Re: transports directory

[woods@most.weird.com (Greg A. Woods)]

[ On Mon, July 17, 1995 at 13:22:37 (ADT), mshappe@nysernet.org wrote: ]
> Subject: Re: transports directory
>
> On the other hand, there is Only One Perl... As far as I know, there is
> only one, very widely disseminated implementation each of Perl4 and Perl5
> -- Larry Wall's. The only possible exception to this rule would be
> MacPerl, the Macintosh implemenation, which still uses Larry's code as its
> core. One excellent implementation means *no* implementation-dialects, 
> and a language whose definition is knowable without more study than its 
> worth...

It wouldn't be so bad if perl-3, perl-4, and perl-5 were compatible, or
if there weren't already a lot of sites with only one of these installed
(yes, perl-3 is nearly gone).

Besides, there's no documented set of minimum attributes and "features"
available to a perl program(mer) -- i.e. perl integrates so much of the
system environment.  This makes it exceedingly difficult to write truely
portable perl programs.

Scheme has a recognized, accepted, standard definition, and it's not to
hard to test an implementation for conformance.  Again the standards
based solution offers the most choice for the implementor, and the most
reliability (and portability) for the user.

-- 
							Greg A. Woods

+1 416 443-1734			VE3TCP			robohack!woods
Planix, Inc. <woods@planix.com>; Secrets of the Weird <woods@weird.com>