Older blog entries for ppol (starting at number 1)

You are perfectly right "ask", "brondsem" etc.. activestate.com has a very nice perl executable. I have downloaded it. It works great. No problem at all thank you!

By the way I there is a real problem with the win32 perl makefile. I have been trying to compile perl on windows ME (I know windows ME is the worst windows32 flavour but it is very stable on my computer so I have no reason to change it yet) for more than 10 hours without any success. I successfully compiled miniperl but never succeeded to compile dynaloader

I am sure that the perl win32 makefile is bugged: at least under my windows version and contrarily to what the perl makefile says /f is NOT a valid option for the "del" command

Anyway if someone with 15 years of professional programming experience is unable to compile a very popular language (i.e. perl) on a very popular (somehow ugly) Operating system(i.e. windows), I think there is a real distribution problem.

"make" is really not a friendly tool when it works ok everything is fine but when there is a problem understanding the problem's nature can be very very tricky (hint for the free software developpers: if you are searching for new programs ideas: a make program that would be user friendly for instance that would not use "tab" as a significant symbol, would report simple error messages,...)

Today I have at last decided to start learning Perl. I have not learned a progamming language since Java 4 years ago it is more than time learn something new. Since Perl seems to be very popular let's go to Perl. I don't believe that some language are better than other I think that what make a language valuable is the number of people using it. The more people use it the more books, libraries, implementation, users, examples,... are available and that is probably much more important than any feature of the language so lets go to Perl

I went to the best library in the city and searched for Perl books. I found the Camel book and the Lama book. I am an experienced programmer so may be I should directly go to the Camel book. But in the end I have chosen the more conservative way and I have chosen the Lama book

I have bought a book instead of using the many free resources available on the net for a very peculiar psychological reason: I need a motivation to force me to go on learning Perl otherwise after 2 days I will begin to look at Python or Ruby or linear amplifier design or anything else. Now I have spent more than 30$ (I mean Euros) on this book. If I give up that will be lost money so If I don't want to lose that investment, I have to succeed in my learning.

Now that I have the book I need the program. Let's go get it on Google. a quick search on « perl » and hop a ZIP file PERL5.8.0 for windows is downloaded on my computer. Now let's look at what is inside this ZIP. Oh they have provided the .c / .h of perl that's nice and a bit useless but may be I will want to look at those to see how it works internally (I probably won't be able to understand it but ok it is the spirit of free software to provide the source isn't it ?)

Hey wait a minute, there is NO EXECUTABLE !!! they provide only the source and they expect me to recompile. Oh Hell that's typical free software mind state, why provide executable when you can recompile it. I hate it it will take me days or may be weeks to compile it. Why can't they provide a nice exe file ??? Do they really think that every user has the exact environment to recompile everything they make.

So I will try to compile it (I will keep you up to date of my compiling efforts)

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