How to obtain perl

And what is perl, anyway?

Perl is the name of a programming language invented by Larry Wall. PERL is an acronym for "Practical Extraction and Report Language" or for "Pathologically Eclectic Rubbish Lister", as Larry says not. I chose perl version 4 for LAOLA and Elser, because there exist free available interpreters for DOS and unix systems, and because of porting problems should occur nearly not. Anyway, future releases of these programs very likely will need perl 5.

PC/MS-DOS systems: Currently I tried only the port of Perl Kit 4.0 done by Darryl Okahata (darrylo@sr.hp.com) in October 1994. He calls it "BIGPERL", and it takes you little more than 1 MB on your harddisk to install it. You should place all files into "C:\PERL\" and the library files to "C:\PERL\LIB\".
Download bperl4x.zip (476 KB, for download a CPAN mirror site close to you will be selected automatically)
Unix systems: Perl should be already installed. If not, ask your administrata.
Other systems: I'm afraid, I have no clue...

Perl Resources

CPAN, Comprehensive Perl Archive Network
Mox.Perl.com by Tom Christiansen
PERL Reference by Clay Irving (com)
The Perl Language Home Page (com)
comp.lang.perl.misc (Usenet)

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