From owner-freebsd-current Wed Mar 13 16:26:57 1996 Return-Path: owner-current Received: (from root@localhost) by freefall.freebsd.org (8.7.3/8.7.3) id QAA07726 for current-outgoing; Wed, 13 Mar 1996 16:26:57 -0800 (PST) Received: from rocky.sri.MT.net (rocky.sri.MT.net [204.182.243.10]) by freefall.freebsd.org (8.7.3/8.7.3) with SMTP id QAA07721 for ; Wed, 13 Mar 1996 16:26:50 -0800 (PST) Received: (from nate@localhost) by rocky.sri.MT.net (8.6.12/8.6.12) id RAA08352; Wed, 13 Mar 1996 17:29:17 -0700 Date: Wed, 13 Mar 1996 17:29:17 -0700 From: Nate Williams Message-Id: <199603140029.RAA08352@rocky.sri.MT.net> To: Jeffrey Hsu Cc: current@FreeBSD.org Subject: Re: To pick a (perl) fight! In-Reply-To: <199603132353.PAA05684@freefall.freebsd.org> References: <199603132353.PAA05684@freefall.freebsd.org> Sender: owner-current@FreeBSD.org X-Loop: FreeBSD.org Precedence: bulk > I'd say that until Larry writes a Perl 5 book so that > there's some easily accessible documentation for it then > > There are over a hundred pages in the perl 5 man pages split out > over 27 sections. I believe free, printable, and searchable on-line > man pages qualifies as easily accessible documentation. Except that not everyone is on the WWW yet, and the on-line documentation is nowhere near as browsable as my Perl 4 book. > most people will stick with perl 4 unless they have a > particular need for perl5. > > Like I write all my scripts in perl5 now? :-) I write my scripts which run in both, which is pretty trivial to do. I don't take advantage of any of the Perl 5 features obviously, but it's more portable that way (across multiple OS's). > We'd also have to fix all the perl code we use if we switch to perl 5. > > We will have to do this sooner or later. A lazy short-cut is to > change the first line of the scripts to read #!perl4. Since perl4 is shipped, we *don't* want to be shipping both perl4 and perl5 in our default distribution. This is not acceptable. Finally, the size of the perl5 distribution is much larger than that of perl4, and no-one has stepped forward with a Perl5 that has been properly B-maked, so it can replace current perl4. Nate