=head1 NAME
-perlfaq1 - General Questions About Perl ($Revision: 1.11 $, $Date: 1997/03/19 17:23:09 $)
+perlfaq1 - General Questions About Perl ($Revision: 1.12 $, $Date: 1997/04/24 22:43:34 $)
=head1 DESCRIPTION
=head2 Which version of Perl should I use?
You should definitely use version 5. Version 4 is old, limited, and
-no longer maintained. Its last patch (4.036) was in 1992. The last
-production release was 5.003, and the current experimental release for
-those at the bleeding edge (as of 27/03/97) is 5.003_92, considered a beta
-for production release 5.004, which will probably be out by the time
-you read this. Further references to the Perl language in this document
-refer to the current production release unless otherwise specified.
+no longer maintained; its last patch (4.036) was in 1992. The most
+recent production release is 5.004. Further references to the Perl
+language in this document refer to this production release unless
+otherwise specified. There may be one or more official bug fixes for
+5.004 by the time you read this, and also perhaps some experimental
+versions on the way to the next release.
=head2 What are perl4 and perl5?
The new native-code compiler for Perl may reduce the limitations given
in the previous statement to some degree, but understand that Perl
remains fundamentally a dynamically typed language, and not a
-statically typed one. You certainly won't be chastised if you don't
+statically typed one. You certainly won't be chastized 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. :-)
It doesn't matter.
In "standard terminology" a I<program> has been compiled to physical
-machine code once, and can then be run multiple times, whereas a
+machine code once, and can then be be run multiple times, whereas a
I<script> must be translated by a program each time it's used. Perl
programs, however, are usually neither strictly compiled nor strictly
-interpreted. They can be compiled to a bytecode form (something of a Perl
-virtual machine) or to completely different languages, like C or assembly
-language. You can't tell just by looking 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.
+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 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.
=head2 What is a JAPH?
projects / p5sagit/p5-mst-13.2.git / blobdiff