Re: MacPerl Script on OS X

On 2008–02–28, at 22:52, Jay Savage wrote:

> On Thu, Feb 28, 2008 at 4:03 PM, Ben Crane <[email protected]>  
> wrote:
>> I have a Perl 4.X script that runs using MacPerl in Classic on my G5
>> Mac but I can't get it to run using Perl in 10.4.11.
>>
>> What do I need to do to make it run?
>>
>> Thanks for any suggestions.
>>
>
> Upgrade it work with Perl 5.x ;)

That's the way to go. Seriously. See below.
>
>
> Seriously, though: what errors are you seeing? Does it rely on any
> modules?

There weren't modules in Perl 4. People wanting such things did things  
in their own mutually-incompatible ways with do(file), eval and such.  
(The way I did it with eval in one big application stopped working in  
Perl 5, which interpreted it as method invocation ...)

> Perhaps more importantly: is it set to be executable on 10.x?
> Remember that the permissions scheme is different on X, and if it was
> set to run under MacPerl on Classic, it won't be executable by
> default.
>
> Unfortunately, a *lot* has changed in the last 15 years (the last
> perl4 release was in 1993), so I don't think anyone is going to be
> able to give you a list of all the things that could be going wrong
> off the tops of their heads.


There are about three pages on incompatibilities between Perl 4 and  
Perl 5 in "Programming Perl" (pages 590-593 in my 3rd edition).

For the hell of it, I just tried building perl-4.036 under Mac OS  
10.5.2, as that might be one way round your problem. I didn't get far  
(about as far as makedepend). There are antiquarians who like doing  
this sort of thing (see <http://dev.perl.org/perl1/>), but I don't  
number myself among them ...
-- 
Dominic Dunlop