[MacPerl] Portability of Perl (was "Epoch-making difference"...)

[hal@dtor.com (Hal Wine)]

At 06:07 96-04-04, Paul Philion wrote:

>I concur.  IMHO, the true joy of Perl is that it is so platform-independant.
>Everytime I have to check for system-specific stuff (like '/' vs ':'),  it
>gets a little annoying.

Perl 4, and Perl 5 to date are *not* designed to be platform
independant.  The documentation refers to "portable", which in the Unix
world means "runs on multiple variants of Unix".  Nothing more.

It's a happy accident that so much of Perl is portable to other OS's.
And now, that's part of the future design goals.

Try Java if you want a, by design, platform independant language. ;-)

>But I use Mac-Perl to develop on my Mac what will run on under UNIX.
>For the most part it works great, but there are a few things that continue to
>bite my.

I do the same.  The differences, for programs that can be developed on
the Mac, are trivial (i.e. Unix Perl functionality is a superset).
Mostly, not using literals for directory separators, or making
assumptions about the contents of \n do it for me.

Perl is a wonderful tool, but it's not a universal solvant.  Perl is
mostly suited to programs that run within the context of a given OS, so
that line ends, times, etc. are all consistant within the program, IMO.

--Hal
Hal Wine <hal@dtor.com>     voice: 510/482-0597