Path: utzoo!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!cs.utexas.edu!uunet!rbj
From: rbj@uunet.UU.NET (Root Boy Jim)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.perl
Subject: Re: Compiled perl scripts?
Message-ID: <124847@uunet.UU.NET>
Date: 7 Mar 91 06:29:17 GMT
References: <9103060939.AA07794@shum.huji.ac.il> <124823@uunet.UU.NET> <5359:Mar701:28:2991@kramden.acf.nyu.edu>
Organization: UUNET Communications Services, Falls Church, VA
Lines: 30

In article <5359:Mar701:28:2991@kramden.acf.nyu.edu> brnstnd@kramden.acf.nyu.edu (Dan Bernstein) writes:
>In article <124823@uunet.UU.NET> rbj@uunet.UU.NET (Root Boy Jim) writes:
>Please distinguish between INITeX's \dump and the checkpointing provided
>by certain UNIX implementations. The former makes perfect sense and is
>always worthwhile. The latter is only occasionally useful.

You might want to explain the difference.

>It is a shame that perl and emacs aren't nearly as flexible as TeX. As I
>suggested to Larry many months ago, perl should have a good enough idea
>of its internal state that it can pass that entire state to another perl
>process; saving the state in a file would do the trick.

At least the state of the perl script prior to execution.

What I am leery of is trying to rewrite an executable program
while it is running. While this is what loaders do, every vendor
seems to have its own variant. Reading undump and crt0.o is enuf
to make almost anyone throw up. While Larry seems to have
provided hooks for this, he provided no working examples
for any systems or machines in the distribution.

In fact, I wonder if he undumps any of his scripts.

Oddly enuf, emacs uses both techniques; undumping, which I consider
evil because of its thousand variations, and byte compilation,
which is machine independent.
-- 
		[rbj@uunet 1] stty sane
		unknown mode: sane