in reply to What constitutes 'perl'?

Well, there's "part of perl", and "part of Perl". I think that we can easily say that "Perl" is more than "perl" - Perl includes the community surrounding perl, which most definitely includes CPAN. And ActiveState, and PM, and ...

"Part of perl" gets a bit more tricky, but I would consider it on a case-by-case basis. There's the official perl distribution - anything in that distribution is "part of (official) perl". There's ActiveState - anything there is "part of (ActiveState) perl". There's whatever Oracle ships (I'm not sure - I use DB2) and anything there is "part of (Oracle) perl". There is more than one way to distribute it ;-)

That said, I'm not sure that these details are that important - perl programmers are a pragmatic bunch, so we just use what we have available, and install what we don't but we need. :-)

Replies are listed 'Best First'.
Re^2: What constitutes 'perl'?
by itub (Priest) on Jul 06, 2005 at 15:00 UTC
    That said, I'm not sure that these details are that important - perl programmers are a pragmatic bunch, so we just use what we have available, and install what we don't but we need. :-)
    Yes, but the problem is that it is harder and more annoying to install a module or application if the dependencies are not listed properly. I for one have never listed strict and warnings (among other core modules) in the PREREQ_PM section of my Makefile.PL. I never imagined that someone would dare distribute perl without these modules! (Now, I hope that at least they include ExtUtils::MakeMaker...)
[reply]
[d/l]
[select]
Re^2: What constitutes 'perl'?
by Anonymous Monk on Jul 07, 2005 at 09:37 UTC
    Well, if you're going to distinguish between 'perl' and 'Perl', than the former is the binary, while the latter is the language. CPAN, Activestate and PM belong to neither. ;-)

    However, when I say "part of perl" (you can't hear the difference between 'perl' and 'Perl'), I mean everything that comes in the tarball. So that includes 'strict.pm', the manual pages and the 'perlbug' program, but doesn't include the DBI and certainly not "the community".

[reply]

In Section Meditations