macOS Perl and active perl.Please help.

[gusious]

Hello to all!

Well, want to get involved with active perl but i know nothing....I typed on Terminal perl -V and it said Perl version 5.8.8.

When i went on http://www.perl.org it said that the current version is 5.10.

What should i do now?Should i download the latest version or leave it just the way it is?


Thank you very very much!!!

 

[yeroen]

You could download the latest version from Macports, Fink, or compile the latest source tarball.

Or just use whatever's on your system. I don't think you'll notice any difference.

 

[gusious]

You could download the latest version from Macports, Fink, or compile the latest source tarball.

Or just use whatever's on your system. I don't think you'll notice any difference.

How do i compile from the source tarball?And what is the tarball??Is it wrong if i download it from the perl page?

Oh,thanks a lot for the help!!!

 

[lee1210]

I'm pretty sure you'll be fine with the version you have. You can look at the changelogs to see if there's anything significant:
http://search.cpan.org/~rgarcia/perl-5.10.0/pod/perl5100delta.pod

That contains difference between 5.8.8 and 5.10.0. If there's nothing there that you need, just use the version you have.

-Lee

 

[lee1210]

http://www.cpan.org/src/perl-5.10.0.tar.gz
The tarball can be found there.

If you don't know what that is/means it's probably better to avoid that for now. If you do want to pursue this, you'll need to be somewhat familiar with building unix tools using configure scripts, make, etc.

-Lee

 

[gusious]

well i really appreciate your help.

I have no idea about perl...My professor suggested that i should start learning active perl because most of the "biological" programs are built on perl.We did some C but nothing much.

But i really loved C so i want to learn Perl!!!!!!!!!

 

[yeroen]

Perl is a lot of fun, and you're professor is right when he claims that Perl is dominant in bioinformatics. This is because Perl is designed for, and excels at, pattern and string matching over large data sets.

 

[operator207]

Just remember these when your working with perl:

Perl is better for impressing the ladies. They think you're
really smart when you can understand something that looks like line noise.

Perl is the succesful experiment of making a braindump executable.

I like the story about using a Dremel, an old VCR, a soldering iron,
and a Perl script to fix your computer.

 

[yeroen]

This:

#:: ::-| ::-| .-. :||-:: 0-| .-| ::||-| .:|-. :||
open(Q,$0);while(<Q>){if(/^#(.*)$/){for(split('-',$1)){$q=0;for(split){s/\|
/:.:/xg;s/:/../g;$Q=$_?length:$_;$q+=$q?$Q:$Q*20;}print chr($q);}}}print"\n";
#.: ::||-| .||-| :|||-| ::||-| ||-:: :|||-| .:|

and this:

@P=split//,".URRUU\c8R";@d=split//,"\nrekcah xinU / lreP rehtona tsuJ";sub p{
@p{"r$p","u$p"}=(P,P);pipe"r$p","u$p";++$p;($q*=2)+=$f=!fork;map{$P=$P[$f^ord
($p{$_})&6];$p{$_}=/ ^$P/ix?$P:close$_}keys%p}p;p;p;p;p;map{$p{$_}=~/^[P.]/&&
close$_}%p;wait until$?;map{/^r/&&<$_>}%p;$_=$d[$q];sleep rand(2)if/\S/;print

are examples of what the above poster is talking about. They're both valid Perl programs.

 

[operator207]

This:

#:: ::-| ::-| .-. :||-:: 0-| .-| ::||-| .:|-. :||
open(Q,$0);while(<Q>){if(/^#(.*)$/){for(split('-',$1)){$q=0;for(split){s/\|
/:.:/xg;s/:/../g;$Q=$_?length:$_;$q+=$q?$Q:$Q*20;}print chr($q);}}}print"\n";
#.: ::||-| .||-| :|||-| ::||-| ||-:: :|||-| .:|

and this:

@P=split//,".URRUU\c8R";@d=split//,"\nrekcah xinU / lreP rehtona tsuJ";sub p{
@p{"r$p","u$p"}=(P,P);pipe"r$p","u$p";++$p;($q*=2)+=$f=!fork;map{$P=$P[$f^ord
($p{$_})&6];$p{$_}=/ ^$P/ix?$P:close$_}keys%p}p;p;p;p;p;map{$p{$_}=~/^[P.]/&&
close$_}%p;wait until$?;map{/^r/&&<$_>}%p;$_=$d[$q];sleep rand(2)if/\S/;print

are examples of what the above poster is talking about. They're both valid Perl programs.

"The Perl Journal"

And

"Forking processes to print out one letter each in the correct order"

Either that or you sneezed in Perl, backwards. Twice.