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- Perl 5 21.2.96
- ------
-
- Port 1.51, February 1996. Changes by S.W.Ellacott@brighton.ac.uk
-
- Installation: just copy !Perl onto your hard disc and merge this !System with
- your own (it installs a module gdbm).
-
- Support for dbm and syscall added.
- Internet support removed 'cos it doesn't work anyway.
- Fixed lots of bugs, including the backtick and ENV hash (see below).
- - see SWEchanges for more details.
-
- Perl 5 3.7.95
- ------
-
- This is RISC OS version 1.50 of Larry Wall's Perl based on the source for
- Perl 5.001. There has been a complete turn around since the original release
- (1.00) due to various problems which appeared to be due to incompatibilities
- with UnixLib. The main trouble was that perl was using a ludicrous amount of
- memory for even small tasks and was unable to increase its wimpslot
- automatically. There is no release date for the next version of UnixLib which
- should fix these problems so, for the moment at least, I have decided to stop
- using it. Instead, I have used Paul Moore's excellent Utils library and the
- acorn specific functions from his original port of Perl 3, slightly altered
- for the new version.
-
- This means there is no longer any Unix path name conversion built in to the
- program so if someone wants to write a function/module/utility to optionally
- do this, feel free :-). I have written a hacked version of fopen to deal with
- .pl and .pm suffixes but this really needs to be more comprehensively done.
- At the moment it tries to open the name as given and on failure checks for a
- suffix (eg foo.pl) then tries to open pl.foo. It also checks the scripts
- directory as a last resort but you must use a .pl suffix for this to work.
-
- BSD socket support is included but I have no idea how well it will work, if
- at all, due to the lack of file descriptors in RISC OS. Some of it definately
- *won't*, so be careful. See the source package for details on how to recompile
- without this (eg if you're short of space).
-
- The help files are still in html format (use ArcWeb to read them). I've
- written a script to convert the original .pod files to stronghelp format but
- it's a bit of a mess just now and stronghelp isn't ideally suited to large
- pages of information - eg you can't have links to other parts of the same
- page afaik and there are a lot of these in the perl manual. I've heard people
- moaning that the html man pages are difficult to print out. Not surprising
- that, really. Seems like a drastic waste of paper too. If you desperately
- need to print something then get a copy of Johan Vroman's "Quick Reference
- Guide". It's available from ftp.cis.ufl.edu:/pub/perl/doc/perlref-5.000.0.tar.gz.
- This should keep you going till the new version of the Camel Book comes out.
-
- Still no sign of Perl 5.002.
-
- All the Best,
-
- Luke.
-
-
- gapv76@udcf.gla.ac.uk
- ltaylor@physics.gla.ac.uk
-
-
- Acknowledgements:
- ------------------
-
- Larry Wall and Co. for obvious reasons.
-
- Paul Moore for his original port and his unix utilities which provided the
- bulk of the extra code needed. Also for his suggestions and criticisms :-).
-
- Jochen from the Stuttgart archive for his suggestions and testing.
-
- Alun Jones for working hard on his thesis :-).
-
- Everyone else who's shown an interest.
-
- Bugs:
- -----
-
- Not many known ones in this revamped version. System calls are still a bit
- dodgy when using backticks (eg $blah = `cat`;). If in doubt, use system()
- instead.
-
- I still haven't fixed the %ENV hash to give the initial environment but
- you can set system variables by assigning to it, eg
-
- $ENV{'Perl$Dir'} = "$.Some.Directory";
-
-
- That's it.