http://www.perlmonks.org?node_id=581646


in reply to Re: RFC: A Primer on Writing Portable Perl Programs
in thread RFC: A Primer on Writing Portable Perl Programs

Of course, portabit over 7 platforms is only half of the story, as the eighth platform accounts for about 90% of all deployed machines ;)

(and yes, that number is pulled out of the air and just exists to illustrate the different goals of portability)

Update: McDarren spotted a typo

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Re^3: RFC: A Primer on Writing Portable Perl Programs
by Anonymous Monk on Nov 01, 2006 at 10:42 UTC
    Yes, but of the 90% of all deployed machines, over 99.99% will never have a user issueing Perl one-liners.

    To do statistics in a meaningful way, the number of deployed machines with a certain shell isn't relevant. You'd have to look at the number of users (where a single person working on N platforms counts as N different users) that issue Perl one-liners. And I'm pretty sure that more than 10% of them run non-Windows shells.

    Not to mention that Unix shells have been ported to Windows, and I do know people using Unix shells on Windows (myself included). I've never heard of the Windows shell having been ported to Unix, never mind any one actually running the Windows shell on Unix.

    Oh, and MacOS has gone Unixy as well, so that's another platform that will have a Bourne shell compatible shell available.

    As for VMS and other exotic OSses, my knowledge about them is too limited to comment.