At 03:03 PM 8/21/2001 -0400, Eileen Byrne wrote:
>I want to convert over 1000 DCL scripts to Perl. Although I have very good
>business reasons for doing this, I am anticipating resistance by our MIS
>department to installing Perl on our VMS system. Has anyone out there had
>their VMS system damaged or comprimised in ANY way by installing Perl?
No. Perl's user-mode, unprivileged code. There's no way that perl, in and
of itself, can compromise your system without explicit action on the user's
part. It's as dangerous as any other user-mode code. Less dangerous, in
some ways, than a simple C compiler install, since perl doesn't need to be
on the system disk nor to update any system files.
Now, having said that, you can tickle some OS bugs with perl the same way
you can with any other program. I'd not recommend threaded perl (heck,
threaded code at all) on an unpatched 7.2 SMP alpha system, but that's not
perl's fault. And you need to be careful with other folks code the same way
you need to with, say, other people's DCL.
Dan
--------------------------------------"it's like this"-------------------
Dan Sugalski even samurai
[EMAIL PROTECTED] have teddy bears and even
teddy bears get drunk
