in reply to Re^4: The future of Perl?
in thread The future of Perl?

Please don't remove VMS, I am so happy that I can use Perl on VMS platforms. Last week, following a change in architecture, I rewrote a 1400+ DCL (equivalent of shell scripting under VMS) program into a 25 lines Perl program. It took me a few hours (I know, a few hours for a 25-line program might seem to be inefficient, but I had to face some complicated system problems having nothing to do with Perl, and I don't think anyone could have rewritten the DCL in less than several days, perhaps more).

Although I am working mostly under Unix, I have to spend about 25 to 30% of my time on VMS platforms. And, for me, Perl is even more important with VMS than it is under Unix, because VMS, while still being pretty efficient in some respects, does not have sed, awk, cut, find, grep, redirections, pipes (well VMS does have a form of pipe, but much less practical), and so on. And Perl basically gives me a substitute for all or most of these Unix utilities.

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Re^6: The future of Perl?
by BrowserUk (Patriarch) on Nov 09, 2014 at 03:20 UTC
    1. I wouldn't remove it.

      It would be (have been) a collective decision; had there been any interest.

    2. I'm not advocating its sudden disappearance from the Perl 5.something line.

      Just from the rewrite; had there been any interest.

    3. Any platform where there were 4 or 5 people prepared to take part in bringing a platform along for the ride, would potentially be supportable.

      But they'd have to be active and keep up.

    4. I would have thought that with Itanium (or whatever other hardware you're running VMS on?) likely to go away in the next couple or three years, you've got greater problems than the lack of VMS support in a non-existent rewrite of Perl.
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