Re: Bad links in the perlfaq

On Oct 8, 2004, at 5:53 PM, _brian_d_foy wrote:

>
> I just checked the links in the latest perlfaq.  Here's the ones
> that aren't any good.  If anyone knows where some of these might
> have gone, which ones are gone for good, and so on, please let me
> know.
>
I poked around at archive.org; some of these are retrievable.

>         http://language.perl.com/versus/
This one is on archive.org  
(http://web.archive.org/web/20040204003754/http://www.perl.com/ 
language/versus/). Badly out of date and therefore wrong on many pf the  
facts now.Several of the subpages are missing as well (but available on  
archive.org as well, if we really want to ressurrect all this);  
possibly Tom C. just got tired of maintaining it, or decided the pages  
were obsolete (for instance, his take on Netscape from 1998 has been  
removed from perl.com, though the page is there, blank). I think it's  
probably a case of finding old and dusty pages and deciding it was  
easier to delete than maintain.

I suggest we replace this with a pointer to  
http://phaseit.net/claird/comp.lang.misc/language_comparisons.html if  
we really really want a language comparisons pointer. Personally, I'd  
just drop it.

>
> ======perlfaq2.pod
>         http://perl.oreilly.com/catalog/cookbook/
New edition is filed under http://www.oreilly.com/catalog/perlckbk2/

>         http://www.perl.com/perl/critiques/index.html
Available at archive.org  
(http://web.archive.org/web/20010509091333/perl.com/critiques/ 
index.html). Out of date, which is probably why it's gone too.
>

> ======perlfaq3.pod
>         http://alpha.olm.net/
Should be http://www.kelehers.org/alpha/ instead (it was fixed one  
place, not the other).

>         http://w4.lns.cornell.edu/%7Epvhp/ptk/ptkTOC.html
Should be http://www.lns.cornell.edu/~pvhp/ptk/ptkFAQ.html (note: FAQ,  
not TOC).

>         http://www.ActiveState.com/Products/Komodo/index.html
Should be http://www.activestate.com/Products/Komodo/

>         http://www.castlelink.co.uk/object_system/
No longer directly available, though the original download page (with  
the software!) is available at archive.org at  
http://web.archive.org/web/20001110130700/www.castlelink.co.uk/ 
object_system/download/.

This has the software and its manuals (version 1.0B). Appeared August  
2000, with free download link; replaced by Advertising Management  
System July 2001, and castlelink.co.uk goes 404 (as a part of the  
Advertising Management System pages) in December 2002. Probably should  
be dropped, since it's been dead since 2001.

>         http://www.starbase.com/
Now owed by Borland, and appears to be just for Visual Studio .NET now.  
Probably should be dropped.

> ======perlfaq4.pod
>         http://language.perl.com/news/y2k.html
At  
http://web.archive.org/web/20040205044555/www.perl.com/language/news/ 
y2k.html; looks like it might be another Tom C. essay, which was  
removed as being out of date. Since it's mostly an opinion piece  
(humans are lazy about dates), it's not a large loss. Drop the last  
paragraph and change it to something like

That doesn't mean that Perl can't be used to create non-Y2K compliant  
programs. It can, but Y2K problems in Perl programs don't stem from  
anything in the language itself; instead, they come from programmers  
misusing date data as if years were 2-digit numbers, not current year  
minus 1900. By now (late 2004), it is to be hoped that Y2K programmer  
errors have already been spotted and fixed! If not, the programs in  
question should probably have been looked at, say, five years ago...

  --- Joe M.