=head1 NAME
-perlfaq1 - General Questions About Perl ($Revision: 3606 $)
+perlfaq1 - General Questions About Perl ($Revision: 8539 $)
=head1 DESCRIPTION
and http://archive.develooper.com/perl5-porters@perl.org/
or the news gateway nntp://nntp.perl.org/perl.perl5.porters or
its web interface at http://nntp.perl.org/group/perl.perl5.porters ,
-or read the faq at http://simon-cozens.org/writings/p5p-faq ,
+or read the faq at http://dev.perl.org/perl5/docs/p5p-faq.html ,
or you can subscribe to the mailing list by sending
perl5-porters-request@perl.org a subscription request
(an empty message with no subject is fine).
There is often a matter of opinion and taste, and there isn't any one
answer that fits anyone. In general, you want to use either the current
-stable release, or the stable release immediately prior to that one.
+stable release, or the stable release immediately prior to that one.
Currently, those are perl5.8.x and perl5.6.x, respectively.
Beyond that, you have to consider several things and decide which is best
See L<perlhist> for a history of Perl revisions.
-=head2 What is Ponie?
+=head2 What was Ponie?
(contributed by brian d foy)
Ponie stands for "Perl On the New Internal Engine", started by Arthur
Bergman from Fotango in 2003, and subsequently run as a project of The
-Perl Foundation. Instead of using the current Perl internals, Ponie
-creates a new one that provides a translation path from Perl 5 to Perl 6
-(or anything else that targets Parrot, actually). You can also just keep
-using Perl 5 with Parrot, the virtual machine which will compile and run
-Perl 6 bytecode.
+Perl Foundation. It was abandoned in 2006
+(http://www.nntp.perl.org/group/perl.ponie.dev/487).
-You can get more information at http://www.poniecode.org/ and
-http://www.parrotcode.org .
+Instead of using the current Perl internals, Ponie aimed to create a
+new one that would provide a translation path from Perl 5 to Perl 6
+(or anything else that targets Parrot, actually). You would have been
+able to just keep using Perl 5 with Parrot, the virtual machine which
+will compile and run Perl 6 bytecode.
=head2 What is perl6?
of programming experience, an understanding of regular expressions, and
the ability to understand other people's code. If there's something you
need to do, then it's probably already been done, and a working example is
-usually available for free. Don't forget the new perl modules, either.
+usually available for free. Don't forget Perl modules, either.
They're discussed in Part 3 of this FAQ, along with CPAN, which is
discussed in Part 2.
shared-memory applications, or extremely large applications. You'll
notice that perl is not itself written in Perl.
-The new, native-code compiler for Perl may eventually reduce the
-limitations given in the previous statement to some degree, but understand
-that Perl remains fundamentally a dynamically typed language, not
+Perl remains fundamentally a dynamically typed language, not
a statically typed one. You certainly won't be chastised if you don't
trust nuclear-plant or brain-surgery monitoring code to it. And Larry
will sleep easier, too--Wall Street programs not withstanding. :-)
once and can then be run multiple times, whereas a I<script> must be
translated by a program each time it's used.
-Perl programs are (usually) neither strictly compiled nor strictly
-interpreted. They can be compiled to a byte-code form (something of a
-Perl virtual machine) or to completely different languages, like C or
-assembly language. You can't tell just by looking at it whether the
-source is destined for a pure interpreter, a parse-tree interpreter,
-a byte-code interpreter, or a native-code compiler, so it's hard to give
-a definitive answer here.
-
Now that "script" and "scripting" are terms that have been seized by
unscrupulous or unknowing marketeers for their own nefarious purposes,
they have begun to take on strange and often pejorative meanings,
the people using that language. If you or your team can be more faster,
better, and stronger through Perl, you'll deliver more value. Remember,
people often respond better to what they get out of it. If you run
-into resistance, figure out what those people get out of the other
+into resistance, figure out what those people get out of the other
choice and how Perl might satisfy that requirement.
You don't have to worry about finding or paying for Perl; it's freely
=head1 REVISION
-Revision: $Revision: 3606 $
+Revision: $Revision: 8539 $
-Date: $Date: 2006-03-06 12:05:47 +0100 (lun, 06 mar 2006) $
+Date: $Date: 2007-01-11 00:07:14 +0100 (jeu, 11 jan 2007) $
See L<perlfaq> for source control details and availability.
=head1 AUTHOR AND COPYRIGHT
-Copyright (c) 1997-2006 Tom Christiansen, Nathan Torkington, and
+Copyright (c) 1997-2007 Tom Christiansen, Nathan Torkington, and
other authors as noted. All rights reserved.
This documentation is free; you can redistribute it and/or modify it
projects / p5sagit/p5-mst-13.2.git / blobdiff