There is a substantial amount of documentation on MacPerl available from within the MacPerl application... check out the "Macintosh specific features" under the "Help" menu, or just go straight to the macperl.pod document and read it through Shuck (same thing.)

Although MacPerl hasn't been updated in awhile (as has been mentioned before, it only tracks against the 5.004 distribution) unless you are doing some hardcore programming you are not likely to notice the difference. The biggest difference between MacPerl and the regular distribution is, IMHO, the fact that you have to use a colon (:) instead of a slash (/) as the file directory separator. Other than that, the biggest problem I've run across (compared to the Unix version) is the lack of a simple database implementation like sdbm, gdbm, ndbm, etc.

The short answer to your question is that yes, in all likelihood your Perl programs should run just like you expect them to under Perl. I would strongly suggest getting a good text editor for Perl programming, though... something like the shareware Alpha or the comercial BBEdit. Both are tied into the MacPerl application and let you edit programs in a much happier friendlier environment than SimpleText.

Gary Blackburn
Trained Killer