Summer Perl Seminar

Preliminaries

Perl is what's called an interpreted programming language. This means a lot of things, but for now, it means you need a perl Interpreter. The interpreter is a piece of softoware that is a lot like a human language interpreter - it turns the code you write in the perl language into a language that the computer can run. Here are some instructions to get a perl interpreter going on your computer.

We'll talk about this in class, but it's important ot be precise when programming. Capitalization and spacing matter a lot, so follow instructions exactly.

Windows Users

Get yourself a copy of Active Perl. It is a free perl interpreter that's very easy to set up and use. To download, click the "Get ActivePerl" link on the right under "Next Steps" to get started. The website also has help files and instructions if you get stuck.

Mac and Linux Users

If you have a Mac or Linux machine, you already have a perl interpreter. You can test this by running the terminal (Go to Applications->Utilities->Terminal.app). From there, type perl -v This should print out something like this: This is perl, v5.8.6 built for darwin-thread-multi-2level (with 3 registered patches, see perl -V for more detail) Copyright 1987-2004, Larry Wall Perl may be copied only under the terms of either the Artistic License or the GNU General Public License, which may be found in the Perl 5 source kit. Complete documentation for Perl, including FAQ lists, should be found on this system using `man perl' or `perldoc perl'. If you have access to the Internet, point your browser at http://www.perl.org/, the Perl Home Page. If that is what you see, everything is ok. If this doesn't work, drop me an email and I'll help.

You will also need a plain text editor. Try TextWrangler.