On Mon, 7 Feb 2000, Chris Bourassa wrote:
> I am planning on learning (at least start) Perl. How different is Linux
> Perl compared to (yuch) Perl for Win32.
I'm going to respectfully disagree with the people here who have stated that
Perl on Win32 isn't like Perl on POSIX. My last job involved creation of a
web-based training system. Platform portability was absolutely critical -- it
had to run on everything from Win32 to most flavors of Unix to Novell Netware.
We chose Perl precisely because the differences between platforms are few.
I think the difficulty people have is that they try to do Unixy things with
Perl on Win32. Of course, they don't work. But if you don't try to do those
Unixy things, Perl does just fine. This usually isn't an issue, as most of
the time, if you're trying to do a Unixy thing, you're trying to do something
specific to Unix, and it simply won't apply to Win32.
You can take a look at the "perlport" man page to read about writing
portable Perl, and to determine just what is and isn't supported by perl on
various platforms. Thus, you can avoid unsupported functions in your
adventures on Win32. If you're interested in writing cross-platform Perl,
there are Perl modules to help you sort all this out at run time.
There are lots of nice modules to interface with the Win32 API. Of course,
these modules don't work on Unix, just like Unix stuff doesn't work on Win32,
but nobody complains about that. Go figure. :)
I would recommend you download ActivePerl from the
http://www.activestate.com site. ActivePerl is the regular Perl distribution,
compiled for Win32, and dressed up nicely with an installer, documentation,
etc. It also includes a lot of Win32 modules and extensions right out of the
box.
> Also, is there anyone in the Newport NH area (within a reasonable
> distance) that is fairly knowledgeable in Perl that might want to give
> some lessons/tutorials.
There is lots of good information on Perl available online. Check out
http://www.perl.com for starters. If you prefer dead trees, O'Reilly
(http://www.ora.com) has some excellent books on Perl. "Programming Perl" is
by Larry Wall, the guy who cursed^H^H^H^H^H^Hblessed us with Perl in the first
place. It is good, but a bit heavy-duty for a beginner. "Learning Perl" is
geared more towards someone learning Perl for the first time and is very good.
You might be interested in "Learning Perl on Win32 Systems", although I've
heard it dilutes the original "Learning Perl" without adding much Win32 stuff.
Hope this helps!
--
Ben Scott
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