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]

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:

• Perl 1.0 in official Perl repository (github)
• AnaTofuZ Perl-1.0 (github) by Christophe Staiesse, 3 Jan 2014
• perl1.porters (2008)
• Perl 1.0.15 released (Dec 18 2002) by schwern

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

Cognominal is indeed the not so new incarnation of stefp. I wanted to figure out the conceptual trajectory from Perl 1.0 to Raku and beyond. For an even larger narrative arc, see Having it both ways.

Thx

Good to know! I still appreciate the enormous amount of assistance you and BooK provided when I was struggling to write The Lighter Side of Perl Culture (Part III): Obfu.

BTW, in more recent times, Smonff seems to be yet another Paris resident with a keen interest in the artistic side of Perl culture.

(Sadly, unlike France with its famous Louvre, the high point of Australian culture appears to be Crocodile Dundee - at least according to the LanX ;-).

I went looking for bigperl for dos a while back and found it, seems i found it again. MS-DOS PERL directory at ftp.ee.umanitoba.ca:/pub/msdos/perl/perl4/. That dir also seems to have some sources too.

added:a "replacement" for awk and sed -Larry Wall <lwall@jpl-devvax.jpl.nasa.gov> Fri, 18 Dec 1987 00:00:00 +0000 (00:00 +0000) might also be of interest if you know enuf about git. i found it via https://stackoverflow.com/questions/38961777/where-can-i-get-perl-4

You can download previous versions of Perl - Old Perl