Perl 4? Why not go all the way back to the 1987? You should be able to build Perl 1.0 from source on modern machines.

Found Perl 1.0_16 by Richard Clamp along with a hacker news story. This old p5p thread describes Richard's motivation for creating Perl 1.0_16 in Dec 2003. Also found an old Perl monks node from 2007: Does somebody have a PERL 0 (or 1.0) code

I was able to build Richard Clamp's perl-1.0_16 on a recent Linux box with just one hack to perl.h (added the #if 0 below to silence a compile error): 

#if 0
#ifdef CHARSPRINTF
    char *sprintf();
#else
    int sprintf();
#endif
#endif

[download]

Though primitive, it seemed to kinda work, at least this sanity test program worked fine: 

print "hello world\n";
$x = 5;
if ($x == 5) {
   print "x is 5\n";
}
if ($x eq '5') {
   print "x is '5'\n";
}

[download]
If you attempt anything fancy (like use strict) it lets you know with the helpful error message "Memory fault". :)

See also gunie, by Allison Randal, an implementation of Perl 1.0 written in Go (which includes the original Perl 1.0 test suite).

Note that Perl 1.0 was officially released on 18 December 1987 (as mentioned in this quiz).

Update: see also modern perl 1.0 by cognominal (Oct 2021) and a few more refs from that thread:

BTW, I wonder if cognominal is a new incarnation of stefp.

In reply to Re: Obtaining old versions of Perl -- Perl 1.0 by eyepopslikeamosquito
in thread Obtaining old versions of Perl by nysus

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