Path: utzoo!utgpu!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!uunet!mcsun!ukc!dcl-cs!aber-cs!pcg
From: pcg@aber-cs.UUCP (Piercarlo Grandi)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.perl
Subject: Re: a program by any other name...
Summary: We do not need the pure text in a dumped perl...
Message-ID: <1727@aber-cs.UUCP>
Date: 12 Apr 90 14:12:45 GMT
Reply-To: pcg@cs.aber.ac.uk (Piercarlo Grandi)
Organization: Dept of CS, UCW Aberystwyth
	(Disclaimer: my statements are purely personal)
Lines: 22

In article <1990Apr6.170914.8305@iwarp.intel.com> merlyn@iwarp.intel.com (Randal Schwartz) writes:
  
  Y'all keep forgetting 'bout "do" and "eval".  The moment you introduce
  those two puppies into the language, you have to have the whole bloody
  Perl compiler in the binary.

Just as a matter of saving disk space, we do not need the whole bloody Perl
compiler; in particular we do not need the pure text, which is damn large.

Under Early Unixes there was an 'overlay' image type, which when exec'ed only
loaded the pure text; nowadays this has to be done with GNU Emacs like
technology. Why not, after all? (I do understand that architecture
independence of the impure data and stack would be a minus, but then it
would be just an option, isn't it?).

Well, *if* I find time, I might well steal code from GNU Emacs and modify it
to do a proper undump that does not dump the text image. Actually, now that
I think of it, this would be a nice addition to GNU Emacs itself.
-- 
Piercarlo "Peter" Grandi           | ARPA: pcg%cs.aber.ac.uk@nsfnet-relay.ac.uk
Dept of CS, UCW Aberystwyth        | UUCP: ...!mcvax!ukc!aber-cs!pcg
Penglais, Aberystwyth SY23 3BZ, UK | INET: pcg@cs.aber.ac.uk