SPUG: RE - using ActivePerl coming from UNIX land

Colin Meyer cmeyer at helvella.org
Thu Dec 23 12:02:00 CST 2004


On Wed, Dec 22, 2004 at 07:40:39PM -0800, Tim Maher wrote:
> On Wed, Dec 22, 2004 at 04:31:13PM -0800, David Innes (CSG) wrote:
> > Hi Brian,  
> > 
> > As Dave Coleman says, ActivePerl is plain old Perl compiled for the Windows
> > platform.  There are some differences but they're very slight.
> > 
> > 1) As Dave mentions the underlying systems are different.  ActivePerl does a
> > pretty good job masking those differences (e.g. you can still use forward
> > slashes to denote folders in paths even though the Windows system uses
> > backslashes.)  
> 
> Is the abilitye to use the "wrong slash-angle" an ActivePerl enhancement
> or a standard Perl feature?

This is a standard feature. Take a glance at 'perldoc perlport' and 
search for 'Files and Filesystems'.

I believe (not from having read an official statement, but from informal
chats with ActiveState employees) that ActivePerl is strictly the same
as the Perl that you get from CPAN, with the occasional difference that
sometimes ActivePerl has patches (bugfixes) backported from bleedperl
before they make it into CPAN Perl. At least this was the case in the
5.6.1 days.

-Colin.


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