Perl 1.0?

James A. A. Joyce writes "The title says it all. There's a tiny blurb over at dev.perl.org. Download Perl 1.0 here, for all of those nostalgics in the Slashdot audience! It's only 263KB, so why not give this piece of 1980s computing history a try?"

Comments

Re: Aside from historical value, what's the point?

[gooru]

so why not give this piece of 1980s computing history a try?

Because I can't actually do anything with it?

eh

[Anonymous Coward]

so why not give this piece of 1980s computing history a try?

Or yould do as the C programmers do and still be left in the 70's.

wtf?

[larry bagina]

I submitted this story almost 20 years ago!

Re:Some things to point out.

[QuMa]

There still isn't a switch statement you know... Well, not in perl 5 anyway. There'll be one in perl 6.

(oh, 5.8 has "use Switch;", but that's cheating)

The Language To End All Languages

[quinkin]

Ah, Perl 1.0.

All the power of QBasic, the readability of assembly, and the flexibility of DOS batch scripting...

(Apol. to all the offended nostalgics :)

Q.

Re:The Language To End All Languages

[Magic Thread]

You forgot "the speed of Java."

Re:There's one good thing about it.

[Anonymous Coward]

If you've actually *USED* Python, you'll find that it's a benefit, not a problem. Enforced readability through the language is good. You should stick to a coding style anyway when you're working on a large project with several people (something you may not have done if you've no significant commercial programming under your belt).

Having Python choose that style for you is a terrific readability benefit compared to something like Perl. It makes decyphering other people's Python code very very easy. It may not be exactly what you like - but I think it's a big win in the long run.

What will you complain about next? Having to use squiggly brackets in C? Having to press enter on the command line?

Re:There's one good thing about it.

[kruntiform]

Oh dear, it looks like you didn't close one of your HTML blocks properly ;) In Python, you can join lines with a backslash:

if 1900 < year < 2100 and 1 <= month <= 12 \
and 1 <= day <= 31 and 0 <= hour < 24 \
and 0 <= minute < 60 and 0 <= second < 60: # Looks like a valid date
return 1

and you can split any kind of bracketed expression over multiple lines:

month_names = ['Januari', 'Februari', 'Maart', # These are the
'April', 'Mei', 'Juni', # Dutch names
'Juli', 'Augustus', 'September', # for the months
'Oktober', 'November', 'December'] # of the year

I don't know that you mean by inline error exception, but you can start comments at the fist column so that they stand out:

# *** inline error exception ***
"something ..."

(Some of the formatting in the above examples is messed up a bit by some slashdot bogusness. Actually, there's an argument against Python's whitespace blocks for you -- things like slashdot can mess them up.)

Ack!!!

[stevens]

As someone who uses perl quite a bit, using this 1.0 gave me a line I've seen before only in my nightmares:

$ ./perl -w -e 'print "Just Another Perl Hacker,";'
Unrecognized switch: -w
$

Aaaaaggghh! Must ... have ... warnings ...

Re:Some things to point out.

[chromatic]

There are certainly hashes in Perl 1. See hash.[ch], for example.

Did you file a bug report for your Makefile issue? Richard Clamp is maintaining this version.