Typing away merrily, John Haggerty produced the immortal words: > If you need source that badly or ever need it in the future just get some > copies of everything and burn some CDs for permanent archival storage. You > can't go wrong there.
We've now made sure that it's on a central CVS server in the UK. Much redundancy in the RAID, and backed up. Somehow, someone had neglected to ensure that we had perl4 source around. Not all _that_ surprising - at the time it was probably taken for granted that it was widely available. > I think in upgrading something like perl4 you could hire say one > programmer to do a temporary job and be on call for you. Then fix > everything. I may be incorrect but isn't most of the core language of perl > pretty much constant? Kind of like C/C++ or perl/delphi It tends to be backwards compatible - new features are added, so you can test for a minimum version number. The move from perl4 to perl5 was hot entirely backwards compatible, though. As an example of the most commonly encountered problem, in perl 4 arrays were not interpolated into double-quoted strings. So, given: @foo=(alpha, beta); $bar="x @foo x\n"; and the default output field separator of a single space, printing $bar will give you: perl4: x @foo x perl5: x alpha beta x which causes problems with, for example, email addresses (in the very common case where double-quotes have been used unnecessarily, or it's inside a here-document, or whatever). There are some other smaller gotchas as well, but I don't remember them off the top of my head as the vast majority of problems arise from the above scenario. -- HTML email - just say no --> Phil Pennock "We've got a patent on the conquering of a country through the use of force. We believe in world peace through extortionate license fees." -Bluemeat