From wells@cs.utk.edu Thu Jul 24 09:31:51 1997

This doesn't really have anything to do with our class or our lab, but it's
a question that I got that others may be interested in.

-- Elton

==================================================

Hi,

> I have been looking in the newsgroups & with several search engins for a
> perl environment for DOS or WIN3.1 .... no luck so far .. do you know of
> any?

Wow... people still use DOS & WIN 3.1? :-)  Anyway, there aren't really any
binary distributions for Perl.  Any binary distributions that do exist were
done by software comapanies (i.e., RedHat has a Perl rpm and Activeware did 
the Perl for Win32), and no company has done one for DOS 6.x or under.  But 
that doesn't mean that it can't be done.  If you're feeling really ambitious 
about this you can go to http://www.delorie.com/djgpp and download djgpp, 
which is a port of the gcc compiler to DOS systems.  You can also get a 
variety of UNIX programming tools that have been ported to DOS while you're 
there.  Then, download the source from anywhere and see what you can do.  This 
will be a real job, though, because the configuration files for compiling Perl 
are shell scripts.  Even when doing this on a UNIX-based system compiling and 
configuring Perl is almost as much fun a re-compiling your kernel.  It would
be a lot easier to splurge and make the upgrade to Win95 and use Perl for 
Win32, but if you need a good weekend project...


-- Elton