I want to practice Perl in Windows Vista 32bit, how can I do it ?
Thanks.
Just an alternative to active perl is strawberry perl, each has it's own merits to use, but I would say that the initially active perl is better implemented (for instance it implements the .pl extension by default, adds perl to the PATH variable etc.) but strawberry perl makes it incredibly easy to install new modules, and generally is really good to use as well.
download Active perl and enjoy
http://www.activestate.com/activeperl
You can use ActivePerl.
ActivePerl is a good Windows Perl interpreter
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I want to use Perl for web development. I have tried to find out how to install it but when I tried to get ActivePerl it wouldn't install on Windows 8. Can anyone tell me how to install Perl on Windows 8? I can go for ActivePerl, Strawberry Perl, or any other Perl release as long as it will work on Windows 8.
As you already know, there are two generally used Perls in the Windows World:
ActivePerl from ActiveState.
Strawberry Perl which is an open source project started by Adam Kennedy -- a big honcho in the Perl community.
What's the big difference between them:
ActiveState Perl was designed to be a Perl solution specifically for Windows (and later both Macs and Linux). ActiveState offers a very nice Perl IDE called Komodo and has excellent Perl support. All you need is some cash. After all, that's how ActiveState makes its money. Of course, you can use EPIC instead of Komodo and get a lot of help from StackOverflow too.
ActiveState comes with the default Win32 modules already installed and also supplies a Perl Package Manager (PPM) instead of using CPAN for installing other CPAN modules. PPM has a nice GUI interface, and its modules have already been precompiled and tested. It also is a bit better than CPAN with dependency tracking. Of course, there might be some CPAN modules not in PPM, and that can be an issue.
Strawberry Perl was started to be more Open Source oriented than ActiveState. By default, Strawberry Perl comes with a Make program and a complete development environment, so that almost all CPAN modules are available and can be installed. This is because Strawberry Perl comes with the complete MinGW package which includes Make and a gcc compiler. The idea was to give Perl people who mainly use Linux and Unix machines a similar feeling solution for Windows.
In reality, both are pretty similar. ActiveState comes with the Win32 modules, but you can install them as needed on Strawberry Perl via CPAN. Strawberry Perl works with CPAN, but ActiveState gives you complete directions for installing the same MinGW environment that Strawberry Perl uses (via their PPM) which allows you to install all CPAN modules that Strawberry Perl can install. ActiveState comes with a GUI Perl Documentation that includes all installed Perl modules, but the perldoc command gives you the same information anyway.
So, if you're more Linux/Unix oriented and want something that feels very similar on Windows, go with Strawberry Perl. If you are using Perl as a Win32 solution, go with ActiveState. And, don't worry about choosing the wrong one. In the end, Strawberry Perl can include all those nice Win32 modules, and ActivePerl can use CPAN.
There is another SO posting that you might find what you're looking for here. A similar posting. In sum, I get the impression that Strawberry Perl would work alright, and so would ActivePerl. I rather liked Strawberry Perl, and it was so long ago that I installed it on my wife's Windows Vista machine that I can't remember why I chose it over ActivePerl, ymmv. CHEERS!
Trying to install Ptkdb on Windows 7 with Perl 5.12.2 (ActiveState) — how do I do this?
ptkdb is available on CPAN. It's also available for Perl 5.12 in the bribes repository:
ppm install http://www.bribes.org/perl/ppm/Devel-ptkdb.ppd
For pure Perl modules, all you need to do is run the Makefile.PL that comes with the module. If the module is a mix of Perl and C, you will need to get a C/C++ compiler for Windows that works with your distribution of Perl. I would recommend asking around for a Windows binary first if it's a mixed module.
I'm looking for a light and portable perl release and found this one, but it seems there is no activity since 2003, which could be ok for me but I want to know if there is known issues.
So, if you can provide me some feedbacks, you're wellcome :)
From my experience, the best way to make distributable Perl scripts for Windows systems is to use a packager like PAR::Packer or ActiveState's PerlApp.
Of course this only works if you don't need to do anything on the fly. But it works really well if you have a collection of scripts that you want to move around and use on many systems.
As a replacement for .bat files, as you indicate in your comments, I have found that I can install enough CPAN modules with Strawberry Perl to make more-or-less cross-platform Perl scripts.
See also Is there a portable Perl? which points to the portable version of Strawberry Perl
There is also a Portable Perl from PortableApps
NB: I have used neither one
ActiveState Perl installs an IIS script mapping for the extension .plx. Is this actually used in real life or just something specific to ActiveState?
No, it's not just from ActiveState. O'Reilly's Learning Perl on Win32 systems recommends naming scripts with a .plx extension to disambiguate them from perl modules (with .pm) and non-executable perl libraries (.pl). Nowadays however I'd name anything that is going to be directly run as .pl.
This is a matter of personal preference. It is not something unique to ActiveState. PLX stands for Perl Executable Script which is perhaps a bit more defined then PL which stands for Perl Script (apparently originally Perl Library as another user wrote). However, on CPAN you see numerous places where PLX is used as extension so it is perhaps not so rare as it seems:
On CPAN acx.plx
kobesearch.cpan.org on SerialPort
tag.plx on CPAN
etc.
UPDATE: here's an earlier discussion of the same discussing whether *.pl or *.plx should be used. It also mentions that Prolog uses *.pl as well and playlist is yet another use.
Google shows some matches and there are quite a few of them on CPAN. In fact, originally, .pl stood for 'Perl library'.
I've grown accustomed to using IPython to try things out whilst learning Python, and now I have to learn Perl for a new job.
Is there anything out there like IPython for Perl? In particular, I'm interested in completion and access to help.
I usually just use perl -de0, but I've heard of:
Devel::REPL
perlconsole
You can have a less featurefull environment by using the debugger "stand-alone".
perl -de 42
(42 is just a constant in order to have a non null "script" loaded).
From there, you can use My::Module and so on. I'm not sure there is a full irb-like program.
[UPDATED FOR RECENT CHANGES]
IPython is no longer just Python; Jupyter can be used for any language with a kernel implementation. Zakariyya Mughal released a Perl kernel last year, so I would recommend trying/contributing to that.
From Perl FAQ:
Perl FAQ 3.7
Is there a perl shell?
Not really. Perl is a programming language, not a command interpreter.
This was the reason why I swhitched from Perl to Python.
Anythow, several python shell workarounds do exist, but they are not even close to IPython