Really? I imagined showing them some stuff from the command line, but if I can set them up to use Perl from within Visual Studio (which I assume they have) that would be dynamite.
Do you have any references for this?
Alex / talexb / Toronto
Life is short: get busy!
Update:Thanks to esskar, I have found the appropriate page on
ActiveState's web site is here.
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I think this is a mistake. For one, you are binding them to Microsoft servitude and this will cause them to think less. Part of Perl (though we do have Win32 support) comes from the Unix culture. A ton of it. Perl initially was (and still is) a blend of sed, awk, and lots of Unix tools. The power of Perl would not have arisen if it's birthplace was Win32.
Also, how many programmers avoid Linux because they are bound to VC++? It's scary. VC++ is an overglorified text editor once you know how to write makefiles -- makefiles are easy -- everyone needs to know them who does C/C++.
Show them to ActiveState.com -- tell them the compiler is free and encourage them to download it. They will love free tools, free documentation, etc, etc. They can still use MSVC as an editor, or something free like Crimson Editor instead!
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I haven't explained much about the students environment, but as far as I can tell they use .NET in Visual Studio running on Windows 2000 (I think the OS is right). If I can drop Perl into a tool that they already know and love (Visual Studio), that's less for them to learn in terms of an editor and an operating system.
I have on loan a laptop loaded with Mandrake 9 .. if I can get that to plug into an overhead for my presentation, then I can fly, but it depends what's available on site. It might have to be a whiteboard-only presentation (ugh).
I would prefer to talk a little about running Perl from the Linux command line .. but I'm not sure how much experience they all have with that animal.
Alex / talexb / Toronto
Life is short: get busy!
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