UNIXisms (was Re: Intercepting HTTP)
Daniel LaLiberte (liberte@ncsa.uiuc.edu)
Tue, 3 Dec 1996 14:48:17 -0600 (CST)
John R. Dennis writes:
> Please avoid system specfic dependencies wherever possible. Although
> perl began life as a UNIX tool it has evolved to be reasonably platform
> independent. One would hope perl scripts and packages would also
> strive for the same portability.
I agree. Part of the problem is that us UNIXers don't know enough
about the other environments to know when we have strayed too far. So
we need folks like you to remind us.
There are some tools available now to help isolate system
dependencies, and abstractions across platforms, such as POSIX, should
be a goal I would think.
We had a short discussion last week on exception handling in which
some features of Lisp (and other languages) were being adapted to
Perl. Another lesson we can learn from the Common Lisp world is the
filesystem abstraction it provides. I have learned a few things about
it and it seems confusing, so perhaps we can do an even better job of
providing a hierarchical file system module for Perl. I think a few
Perl modules almost make that possible now (Tie::Dir for one).
--
Daniel LaLiberte (liberte@ncsa.uiuc.edu)
National Center for Supercomputing Applications
http://union.ncsa.uiuc.edu/~liberte/