Do you have make, yacc, and a C compiler? If so, reinstall from source (there may be other requirements). There's no sense putting up with a botched installation. Importants parts of perl live in the libraries.

Don't put up with a broken Perl install. Just download the source and compile your own. Then boot up CPAN.pm and figure out which pieces you really need to invent!

-sam

Their reasoning is usually that they can't be sure the code is good enough or they can't be bothered. Instead, they end up reinventing wheel after wheel.

The vanity! Not only do they reinvent the wheel, but unless they spend a huge amount of time on their own code, what they end up with will most likely be of inferior quality to most of what you can find on CPAN.

Shop around. You'll save huge amounts of time, and end up with fewer bugs.

I have a crippled Perl 5.6.1 on my Sharp Zaurus PDA. Some modules are there, others aren't. It's a big enough pain in the rear that I've mostly gotten away from using Perl on the Z, and instead, use the Z as a perldoc reader and Perl CD Bookshelf reader (I've got my CF card loaded up with those gems).

By all means reinstall Perl as Zaxo suggests. Then download yum from Duke University and ask it what modules you need. I am the most ignorant Perl programmer in the world and I can get it to work. If you are not familiar with it yum = Yellowdog Updating Module. I think it works for the Mac.
Good luck,
xenchu

Try Fink:

http://fink.sourceforge.net/

Fink is a utility that helps load the latest opensource software on OS-X, including Perl 5.8.0

They describe it as:
" This differs from the Apple OS X 10.1 distribution of Perl 5.6.0 (and supporting fink libraries) in that it retains the perl version subdirectories in the lib tree. Without these, upgrading or downgrading Perl breaks all of the binary modules."

I think the reference to 5.6.0 is a typographical error - it describes the Fink version as 5.8.0 elseware on the same page.

No, it doesn't look like a typo. Mac OS X 10.1 (and 10.2, incidentally) were distributed with 5.6.0 by default. So the Fink distribution does indeed differ from the 10.1 distribution of Perl 5.6.0.

I am amused, however, that the parent note mentioned that Mac OS X 10.3 comes with Perl 5.8.1 by default and you're suggesting using fink to install 5.8.0.

Thank you all for your concern and help with installing.

Perhaps I should have said that I did a manual install of Perl and everything is fine now.

The key problem for me was that with this crippled version of Perl on OS X you get CPAN, but CPAN apparently can't install anything because of missing header files, CORE/something.h was missing? It was very annoying anyway.

But I long ago sorted that stuff out and Perl and CPAN and fink are all working just fine thank you.

My question was "what could I do with just Perl", not "what can I do with my crippled install of Perl", so it was really more of a philosophical question -- the things we love about Perl, that make it so useful, how many of them are in the modules and how many are in the language/application itself?

Technically, you can do all of the same things with just pure Perl that you can do with all of the modules on CPAN installed. For that matter, technically, you could do all of the same stuff with C or assembly language, or anything else that's Turing-equivalent. (If you're not familiar with this concept, do a Google Groups search for Turing Equivalence.)

So, why do we have CPAN then? Because in practice there's often a big difference between technically can be done and what it is suitably convenient or worthwhile to do. It is *possible* to write an email client in pure Perl with no modules, but it will take you weeks just to get a very basic working start. With POP3Client, Net::DNS, and Net::SMTP, you can have the same amount done in hours. It is *possible* to write database stuff in pure Perl to interface with an RDBMS, but with DBI you can do it in a *lot* less time. It is *possible* to study up on PKWare's Zip archive file format and write your own Perl code to read and write zipfiles, but you'll spend days or weeks; with Archive::Zip you can do it in an afternoon and have time left over for testing.

In short, the value of CPAN is not in what it enables you to do, but in what it saves you from needing to do.

$;=sub{$/};@;=map{my($a,$b)=($_,$;);$;=sub{$a.$b->()}}
split//,".rekcah lreP rehtona tsuJ";$\=$ ;->();print$/
[download]

No. Turing equivalence is not enough.

Turing equivalence allows you to compute the same things, true, but it does not allow you to _do_ the same things. For instance if you take brainf*ck, well known to be turing complete, how do you get brainf*ck to do a syscall? You can't.

Besides the computational power you also need the "functional" power. In Unix this means that you need syscalls. If you have syscalls then you have it all. (Since I/O for instance translates into syscalls).

On a more theoretical note you might observe that the Turing machine has an "infinite tape". So any machine that is equivalent to a turing machine will have to have infinite storage capacity.

Turing equivalence allows you to compute the same things, true, but it does not allow you to _do_ the same things.

Besides computation, the only other thing there is to _do_ is I/O. Whether Perl has adequate I/O without modules is going to depend I suppose on what kind of I/O you need to do, but in general if you compare it to other existing languages it fares quite well in that regard. Syscalls are not, strictly speaking, needed for anything other than I/O.

However, I certainly agree that Turing equivalence is in itself not enough to expect out of a good language. That was actually my point, though maybe I didn't state it very clearly. If that were enough, we could all just use assembly language, or, as far as that goes, program using hexadecimal numbers directly. Having a good language is about making things more efficient, easier, better, et cetera; for Perl, part of that is the CPAN; I personally do not consider any Perl installation to be complete or terribly useful in practice without a working CPAN.pm

There happens to be at the moment more on this topic (Turing equivalence and its inadequacy as a criterion for determining the usefulness of a language) on my pad, as I am presently in the process of piecing together there a pending meditation which may or may not end up getting posted. (Feedback on it, including whether it is worth posting, is welcome.)

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$;=sub{$/};@;=map{my($a,$b)=($_,$;);$;=sub{$a.$b->()}}
split//,".rekcah lreP rehtona tsuJ";$\=$ ;->();print$/
[download]

• SSH has been implemented in pure perl. You could do that. Your limitation is based on size, not dependency, so any module functionality you reproduce will still take up (possibly more or less) space on your system. Is an SSH client binary smaller than a gzipped ssh client script including the pure perl implementation?
• You could think about all the things you (or others) used to do with shell scripts before they had perl. Ok, now think about how much you could improve the functionality of your code when you discovered sed, awk, or grep. Now rewrite it in perl.
• Building on the previous item, if you had core modules like Socket you could build all kinds of marvelous tools. A web browser with simple markup (lynx), a file server that takes a filename and dumps contents back down the pipe (webserver), a multiuser chatsystem (ychat), a lush descriptive text based game (mud/bbs). I've seen all these implemented as shell scripts, they're cake in perl. They are all very simple protocols you could emulate with a telnet client, could you imagine trying to do something like this on a heavy modern protocol based on XML wrapped packets, bleh.

10 print "elwarren is cool!"
20 goto 10
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