Perl and MVS

adamsj has asked for the wisdom of the Perl Monks concerning the following question:

Apparently, no one has ever made reference here to using Perl on mainframes, specifically on MVS.

I'm a little shocked! but really not all that surprised.

Still, that's what I've got to do--okay, it's what I'm going to do, since I'm using mainframes for the first time in my life, and since Perl is my first tool of choice for any given problem.

So: Has anyone out there used Perl on MVS? Are there any pitfalls to be aware of? Any thing I should know?

And if there isn't anyone who knows about this, is there interest in me writing up what (if anything) happens?

adamsj

They laughed at Joan of Arc, but she went right ahead and built it. --Gracie Allen

Comment on Perl and MVS

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Re: Perl and MVS by davorg (Chancellor) on Apr 23, 2001 at 16:14 UTC
You might find the perl-mvs mailing list to be interesting. http://lists.perl.org/showlist.cgi?name=perl-mvs -- <http://www.dave.org.uk> "Perl makes the fun jobs fun and the boring jobs bearable" - me	[reply]
Re: Perl and MVS by wardk (Deacon) on Apr 23, 2001 at 17:54 UTC
adamsj, while the issue hasn't come up here before, I have used Perl on MVS (posting DB2 data to an intranet). Since the Perl will be running in Open Edition (now "Unix System Services"), you will not see all that much difference from using it on another Unix, aside from experiencing all the joy that is the unix "shell" on mvs. ( a glorified SPF...for those not familiar with SPF, think 80 character punch cards bolted onto a monitor). I used Perl mostly as callout functions inside of IBM's Net.Data (PHP/ASP-like tagging using REXX) to accomplish string thingies that were excessively ugly in REXX. I was not involved in setting it up directly, so I can't speak to the technical difficulties that may be involved in compiling site-specific modules (I suspect there are many workaround-like issues here), but my recolection is that all the builtin perl functions behaved as they would on any "normal" unix system (after we resolved what were mostly "environment" issues). For instance, you could open a partition dataset member just as any other file on a unix system, with normal open syntax. good luck with your project! Feel free to email or /msg me for more information, although keep in mind it had been 3 years since my experience, so I what I know is likely pretty dated by now.	[reply]
Re: Perl and MVS by Dragonfly (Priest) on Apr 23, 2001 at 17:20 UTC
Well, perhaps it's not exactly a mainframe, but there was an interesting thread a while back called Perl on IBM AS/400?. I worked for a while getting Perl going on that platform, and although I was ultimately successful, it was certainly not as easy as running Perl on, say, Linux or Win32, obviously. That said, I think you'll find that if you are already familiar with the platform, you'll have a fairly easy time getting Perl running, although you might have relatively sparse support for native system stuff (i.e. weird filesystem quirks, forking might not work quite right, etc) or other general funkiness. ;-) Let us know how it works for you, it sounds like it could be a real adventure!	[reply]
Re: Perl and MVS by BigJoe (Curate) on Apr 23, 2001 at 22:29 UTC
I would be very interested in any information that you can pull together. In the near future my office is going to be starting to grab data from the mainframe and dump it into our Oracle Database. --BigJoe Learn patience, you must. Young PerlMonk, craves Not these things. Use the source Luke.	[reply]