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Re: Wish Setup would accept my Perl


Brian Mathis wrote:
How about if you are writing a Windows application? What if you need to manipulate the Registry or access Win32::OLE objects? You certainly need AS Perl for that. It's not hard to imagine why you'd need a Windows-centric version.
Then you are obviously and decidedly writing non-portable code.
Portability is not the be-all, end-all purpose of an application, and eschewing it is not necessarily laziness.
Portability was the issue I was describing. If you wish to talk about writing non-portable stuff then granted using something like AS Perl will actually help you achieve that goal. Have fun. Oh, and BTW I was speaking specifically about instances in my career where people have unwisely eschewed portability only to have it bite them in the ass later.
It's actually pretty low on the list of priorities. Normally "getting the job done" is higher on the list. For most people, the goal of scripting is to accomplish a task, like data processing or automation. Each of those goals is almost guaranteed to interact with some other proprietary part of the system that is also not portable. That's the difference between coding an app and scripting. Scripting is more often the glue between other parts.
Those are the words of somebody who lacks vision and thinks only in terms of the problem directly before him.
That's not to say that you can't also write a portable, full-blown application in Perl, but that's coming from a different perspective. Maybe that's where the differences lay here, in the perspective.
A Perl application or script or even glue code need not be "full-blown" to be portable. Portability is a function of seeing a specific task to do and doing it in a way that will work on multiple platforms. It's the opposite of a proprietary solution. That does not automatically mean a little script has suddenly become a full-blown application, rather it means that a script was written with more than one environment in mind.
--
Andrew DeFaria <http://defaria.com>
Music, I suppose, will be the thing that sustains me when I'm too old for sex, and not quite ready to meet God. - Dolly Parton



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