There were large freely available C libraries that pre-dated even our beloved Perl. In fact if wasn't for freely available 'C' libraries Perl might not exist.

Lets look at one of Perl's most admired features the regex engine. Perl Version 1 used Larry's regex from rn which was based on James Goslings Emacs regex . In V2 Larry realized that V1 regex was lacking so he turned to Henry Spencer's popular regex package and the rest is history.

In fact some of our most popular Modules depend on freely available 'C' code. Take XML::XXXX -> expat, soon to be upgraded to libXML2 from the GNOME project. So I guess in a way CPAN has always delivered C code to the masses.

CPAN is an incredible architecture for accepting, tracking and delivering code. Loved by us and coveted by our brethren. I would watch carefully our Python brothers as they create their version of 'a better CPAN'. They might just surprise us!

Truth and history are as valuable to the true cynic as air.
-- Bernard Shaw (??)

mitd-Made in the Dark
'My favourite colour appears to be grey.'