Path: utzoo!utgpu!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!cs.utexas.edu!sun-barr!lll-winken!elroy.jpl.nasa.gov!jpl-devvax!lwall
From: lwall@jpl-devvax.JPL.NASA.GOV (Larry Wall)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.perl
Subject: Re: Perl on Motorola M88k's
Message-ID: <11389@jpl-devvax.JPL.NASA.GOV>
Date: 11 Feb 91 20:28:05 GMT
References: <1314@ecicrl.ocunix.on.ca>
Reply-To: lwall@jpl-devvax.JPL.NASA.GOV (Larry Wall)
Organization: Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, CA
Lines: 19

In article <1314@ecicrl.ocunix.on.ca> clewis@ferret.ocunix.on.ca (Chris Lewis) writes:
: I installed Perl (PL18 - stable but old) onto a Motorola 8864 88000 RISC
: box.  Greenhills C.  It hangs when doing some moderately simple things.
: Such as:
: 	$list = `ls directory`;
: 	@L = split($list);
: 	print $L[0];

Er, that may be moderately simple, but it's also simply wrong.  The first
argument to split is a pattern to split on.  You're trying to split $_
using $list as a delimiter.

Earlier version of perl do unexpected things when you do unexpected things.
It's getting better, but feeding random stuff to the regular expression
parser is bound to do interesting things.  In this particular case,
patchlevel 18 has a known problem with patterns containing more than 255
constant characters in a row.

Larry