[comp.lang.perl] Perl under other OSs

alex@rata.vuw.ac.nz (Alex Heatley) (12/14/89)

We are switching from an VM/CMS OS to VMS over the next year and one of
our problems is converting all our scripts, written in REXX, to some other
scripting language. Given that we are going to also be running UNIX on
some of our machines, it would be nice to have a consistent scripting
language over both UNIX and VMS, Perl seems ideal for this. 

BUT, does anyone have any comments on the difficulties of adapting Perl to
run under VMS? I suspect that it isn't a trival task (requiring
modification to several features/calls of the language), perhaps a subset
would be possible. 

Is there anyone out seriously conasidering porting Perl to VMS (It would
be nice, Perl blows DCL right out of the water).

Thanks for any comments you have.


Alex Heatley                                Computing Services Centre
Domain: alex@rata.vuw.ac.nz                 Victoria University of Wellington
Path: ...!uunet!vuwcomp!rata!alex           P.O Box 600, New Zealand.
Trolls can often be found under bridges ... or in Computing Departments.

cmf@obie.cis.pitt.edu (Carl M. Fongheiser) (12/14/89)

In article <1989Dec13.190558.21867@comp.vuw.ac.nz> alex@rata.vuw.ac.nz (Alex Heatley) writes:
>BUT, does anyone have any comments on the difficulties of adapting Perl to
>run under VMS? I suspect that it isn't a trival task (requiring
>modification to several features/calls of the language), perhaps a subset
>would be possible. 

Indeed, a subset is possible.  I have put together a somewhat crippled
version of Perl on VMS, but it still seems usable.  It's a little more crippled
than it needs to be, but I was looking for expediency before adding
functionality.  Major omissions:  it doesn't know how to deal with
directories, nor anything that looks like a subprocess.  Other very Unix
specific stuff was also omitted.  

>Is there anyone out seriously conasidering porting Perl to VMS (It would
>be nice, Perl blows DCL right out of the water).

I'm going to put a little more work into my version before I send my
changes back to Larry.  Even as crippled as it is, my version can do
some pretty amazing things.  (If you have MultiNet, it can deal with
TCP sockets, though not DECnet yet.)

				Carl Fongheiser
				cmf@unix.cis.pitt.edu

weisberg@hpccc.HP.COM (Len Weisberg) (12/16/89)

Since the title is so general, I'll jump right in:

Has anybody looked at getting (a subset of?) perl up on MS-DOS?

- Len Weisberg - HP Corp Computing & Services - weisberg%hpccc@hplabs.HP.COM