[MacPerl] Accessing printers from MacPerl

[davidh@sdl.ug.eds.com]

I noticed this enquiry posted in the archive at Uni-Melb last October. 
However, there was no reply posted publicly so I'll have to ask again. What I'd
like to know is how to access my printer from a MacPerl script. I've tried 
such obvious steps as:

open( PRINTER, ">Dev:Printer")

and writing text to this filehandle

and many variants of this. It doesn't give an error, so the open must succeed,
but it never prints anything. What do I need in order to be able to 
print stuff? My printer is directly connected to my LCIII, not across a network
or anything complicated. I have read a little on the web about XCMDs and XFCNs, 
but while I am competent in programming under Unix, I have done no programming
on the Mac other than the Perl scripts I have written. Ideally I'd like 
something written in Perl itself, as I don't have a C compiler or linker to 
build executables from C source. 

Hope someone can help on this, otherwise I'll have to continue sending large 
amounts of formatted output to files and then firing up BBEdit to print these.
This is rather tedious...

                        thanks, David Herbert, Cambridge UK.