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From: les@chinet.chi.il.us (Leslie Mikesell)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.perl
Subject: Re: Compiled perl scripts?
Message-ID: <1991Mar07.185446.9751@chinet.chi.il.us>
Date: 7 Mar 91 18:54:46 GMT
References: <124823@uunet.UU.NET> <5359:Mar701:28:2991@kramden.acf.nyu.edu> <124847@uunet.UU.NET>
Organization: Chinet - Chicago Public Access UNIX
Lines: 18

In article <124847@uunet.UU.NET> rbj@uunet.UU.NET (Root Boy Jim) writes:

>Oddly enuf, emacs uses both techniques; undumping, which I consider
>evil because of its thousand variations, and byte compilation,
>which is machine independent.

I think the best perl approach would be to allow explicit keywords in
the program to specify where to look for and/or store the compiled
version.  Then if you attempt to run the uncompiled version and this
keyword is parsed, the specified location is checked for a compiled
copy that is at least as new as the uncompiled version.  The compiled
copy could have some magic tokens at the beginning so they could be
recognized and executed directly, and byte order, word size, and allignment
requirements of the machine that compiled the code could be deduced
as well so most machines could do a quick fix and continue.

Les Mikesell
  les@chinet.chi.il.us