Re: Short Shameful Confession

[thinker]

Hi Monks,

I invented the "eval 'exec'" hack

Don't know about you guys, but little snippets of history like this, are what makes Perl Monks so special to me.

I am filled with shame.

Why. Isn't a hack which stands the test of time a Good Hack (tm).

It reminds me of a statement which Guido van Rossum attributes to his father.

"There is nothing more permanent than a temporary solution"

Long life to your hack, Chip. :-)

cheers

thinker

[chip]

Well, if wetting my pants in public saved the world, I'd do it, but I'd still be pretty ashamed about it....

As for history: I found Perl while using SCO Xenix/286. I actually did the original port of Perl to a mixed 16/32-bit architecture -- but that's probably a Meditation for another day. SCO Xenix was thoroughly behind the times -- it didn't support the "#!" feature until long after BSD-based systems did. So I started trying to figure out how to run a Perl program as easily as the users of more modern systems because I was, yes, too lazy to type "perl programname" a hundred times a day or create two files for each script. The breakthrough was realizing that Perl and shell both understood eval STRING, but they had different ideas about where statements end.

BTW, SCO's Bourne shell would use the C shell to run any script whose first character was a "#". That's why Perl to this day ignores a first line that starts with a colon....

    -- Chip Salzenberg, Free-Floating Agent of Chaos

[ask_chinna]

Hi Chip and Thinker, its a fine philosophical discussion, but i am too young to understand your philosophy. Please come to my world and teach your lessons. Thank you