[Info-vax] Programming languages on VMS

[Craig A. Berry]

On 1/23/18 10:06 AM, Stephen Hoffman wrote:
> On 2018-01-23 13:26:37 +0000, Craig A. Berry said:

>> Among those not mentioned, there is Lua (vsi-i64vms-lua-v0502-3-1 is 
>> available now) and Perl. I don't expect "porting" Perl to involve much 
>> more than tinkering with how the configuration script deals with 
>> architecture names.
> 
> Lua 5.3.4 is current.
> 
> The Perl kit isn't current, either.

The VSI Perl kit may not be completely current, but most vendor-provided
distributions are not much, if any, newer. My kits are still available at:

<https://sourceforge.net/projects/vmsperlkit/files/?source=navbar>

and are not far behind current (though not completely up-to-date as of
this writing). I keep hoping for a way to produce signed kits but so
far I don't think there's anything available.

> Somebody really needs to be testing "head" for Lua, Perl and Python and 
> the rest, and I don't think that's happening with any of the community 
> programming language.  

I build "blead," the development branch of Perl, several times a week
and patch whatever build and test failures I can manage, which isn't
100% but is usually pretty close.

> And I'm routinely seeing breakage.

I also do attempt to fix bugs in Perl if you happen to notice any. Most
of the breakage I see stems from problems with the current CRTL, though
our attempts to work with or around the CRTL also cause trouble sometimes.