Limbic~Region has asked for the wisdom of the Perl Monks concerning the following question:

All,
I no longer code but I am helping someone update some legacy code that they "borrowed" from me a years ago. 
use Digest::MD5 'md5';
my $foo = 'hello, world!';
print unpack('q', md5($foo));

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They only have stock 32-bit Perl 5.10.1 and a very restricted environment (don't ask). Is there a way to do the above in 32-bit perl? They can use any module that shipped with 5.10.1 as well as any pure perl module that they could easily copy/paste.

Cheers - L~R

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Re: Equivalent of unpack 'q' with 32-bit Perl (a8)
by Anonymous Monk on Sep 06, 2016 at 20:23 UTC

    Get the bits only?

    use constant CAN_PACK_QUADS => !! eval { my $f = pack 'q'; 1 };
sub Int64  { unpack( ( CAN_PACK_QUADS  ? 'q<' : 'a8' ), $_[-1] ) }
sub UInt64 { unpack( ( CAN_PACK_QUADS  ? 'Q<' : 'a8' ), $_[-1] ) }

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      Anonymous Monk,

      Get the bits only?

      Presumably you mean take the first 8 bytes and then convert them to an integer by extracting the individual bits and then doing base conversion.

      If that's not what you mean, please enlighten me. If that is what you mean, I would need to play with it because I don't think the b/B templates would be helpful, I think it would need vec

      Cheers - L~R

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        No, I mean dont do any conversion if its not possible :) treat it as a string, convert as quad when you can, otherwise its raw bytes ...

        There is always bigint which says 

          print hex("0x1234567890123490"),"\n"; # Perl v5.10.0 or later

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        So 

        use constant CAN_PACK_QUADS => !! eval { my $f = pack 'q'; 1 };
use Math::BigInt;
print quad('ffffffffffff'), "\n";
sub quad { 
    CAN_PACK_QUADS
    ? unpack( 'q<', $_[0] )
    : Math::BigInt->new( '0x'.$_[0] )
}
__END__

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