On Sat, 20 Mar 2004, Bohdan Peter Rekshynskyj wrote: > Is there such an animal? > And is it GNU-ed?
Aside from /usr/bin/perl (or C:\perl\perl.exe)? There is (was? "is", I suppose...) that could produce Windows .exe files out of win32 Perl scripts, but it doesn't have a very good reputation as far as I can tell. For every other platform Perl runs on (everything?), /usr/bin/perl is pretty standard, and you're generally better off just distributing programs that way than trying to compile them to some kind of binary. If you think about it, if you want binaries, you're going to have to recompile them for every platform you're interested in. The same ascii Perl script will generally run without modification on OSX, Linux, Solaris, Irix, AIX, HP/UX, BeOS, SCO, etc. A binary, on the other hand, will have to be custom made for every one of those platforms, and often you'll need different versions of your program for different versions of the platform it is being ported to. For some reason, the Java people seem to think this kind of thing is a big deal, even though every *nix scripting language has been able to do this more or less forever... :) Why do you want a compiler, out of curiosity? What are you trying to do? If you want to write something to share with other OSX users, you should generally be able to just use a regular script -- the only real issue to think about is being compatible with Perl 5.6 for pre-Panther users. -- Chris Devers
