Larry Wall [Wed, 27 Jan 1988 22:18:25 +0000]
perl 1.0 patch 8: perl needed an eval operator and a symbolic debugger
I didn't add an eval operator to the original perl because
I hadn't thought of any good uses for it. Recently I thought
of some. Along with creating the eval operator, this patch
introduces a symbolic debugger for perl scripts, which makes
use of eval to interpret some debugging commands. Having eval
also lets me emulate awk's FOO=bar command line behavior with
a line such as the one a2p now inserts at the beginning of
translated scripts.
Arnold D. Robbins [Tue, 26 Jan 1988 01:16:41 +0000]
perl 1.0 patch 7: use of included malloc.c should be optional
The version of malloc.c that comes with perl was not really intended
to be used everywhere--it was included mostly for debugging purposes.
It's a nice little package, however, so I'm making it optional (via
Configure) as to whether you want it or not.
Andrew Burt [Mon, 25 Jan 1988 23:31:23 +0000]
perl 1.0 patch 6: printf doesn't finish processing format string when out of args.
printf "%% %d %%", 1; produces "% 1 %%", which is counterintuitive.
Arnold D. Robbins [Mon, 25 Jan 1988 20:53:22 +0000]
perl 1.0 patch 5: a2p didn't make use of the config.h generated by Configure
The a2p program used index() and bcopy(), both of do not exist
everywhere. Since Configure was already figuring out about those
functions, it is fairly trivial to get a2p to make use of the info.
Paul Eggert [Mon, 25 Jan 1988 19:48:31 +0000]
perl 1.0 patch 4: make depend doesn't work if . isn't in your PATH
make depend doesn't work if . isn't in your PATH.
Larry Wall [Sat, 23 Jan 1988 15:23:55 +0000]
perl 1.0 patch 3: Patch 2 was incomplete
I left one file out of patch 2. This is perhaps forgivable since
it is a file that is produced automatically by metaconfig along
with Configure.
Andrew Burt [Sat, 23 Jan 1988 14:57:57 +0000]
perl 1.0 patch 2: Various portability fixes.
Some things didn't work right on System V and Pyramids.
Dan Faigin, Doug Landauer [Thu, 21 Jan 1988 09:21:04 +0000]
perl 1.0 patch 1: Portability bugs and one possible SIGSEGV
On some systems the Configure script and C compilations get
warning messages that may scare some folks unnecessarily.
Also, use of the "redo" command if debugging is compiled in
overflows a stack on which the trace context is kept.
Larry Wall [Fri, 18 Dec 1987 00:00:00 +0000]
a "replacement" for awk and sed
[ Perl is kind of designed to make awk and sed semi-obsolete. This posting
will include the first 10 patches after the main source. The following
description is lifted from Larry's manpage. --r$ ]
Perl is a interpreted language optimized for scanning arbitrary text
files, extracting information from those text files, and printing
reports based on that information. It's also a good language for many
system management tasks. The language is intended to be practical
(easy to use, efficient, complete) rather than beautiful (tiny,
elegant, minimal). It combines (in the author's opinion, anyway) some
of the best features of C, sed, awk, and sh, so people familiar with
those languages should have little difficulty with it. (Language
historians will also note some vestiges of csh, Pascal, and even
BASIC-PLUS.) Expression syntax corresponds quite closely to C
expression syntax. If you have a problem that would ordinarily use sed
or awk or sh, but it exceeds their capabilities or must run a little
faster, and you don't want to write the silly thing in C, then perl may
be for you. There are also translators to turn your sed and awk
scripts into perl scripts.