http://qs321.pair.com?node_id=926875

andreas1234567 has asked for the wisdom of the Perl Monks concerning the following question:

I have been asked to figure out if there exists a perl for the HP NonStop (previously known as Tandem NonStop, Compaq NonStop) platform. It is not listed among the 34 Supported Platforms in perldoc. There is a mention of it on the perl.perl5.porters mailing list a while back (Aug 2010) but I can find few other references than HP's own marketing material (2007) that contains broken links to their open source information pages.

Would any enlightened Monk be able to advise?

--
No matter how great and destructive your problems may seem now, remember, you've probably only seen the tip of them. [1]

Replies are listed 'Best First'.
Re: perl for HP NonStop
by johngg (Canon) on Sep 20, 2011 at 09:51 UTC

    There is something called the Open System Services Environment under the HP NonStop o/s that gives access to a *nix-like shell and commands. I can't be certain (I was sent on a course a while back but haven't had access to a NonStop box since) but my recollection is that there is a perl interpreter in that environment but what version it might be I can't recall.

    Cheers,

    JohnGG

Re: perl for HP NonStop
by eyepopslikeamosquito (Archbishop) on Sep 21, 2011 at 10:44 UTC

    You can download Perl 5.8.7 for the NSK OSS environment from the ITUGLIB Open Source Technical Library. I've used it on OSS (a Unix-like environment) and it works reasonably well. You can interoperate with the Guardian environment from OSS by running the gtacl command via Perl's system function or backticks. IIRC, I had to make a one-line change to the File::Find module (changed the value of one of the link variables I think, update: added the line $File::Find::dont_use_nlink = 1; to Find.pm) to get it to work reliably. And setting up the networking (I copied /etc/hosts, /etc/services, /etc/protocols, /etc/inetd.conf and a bunch of other Unix-like files across from a Unix box) was a pest.

    Last time I looked (around five years ago), building Perl from source on OSS was not trivial. The ITUGLIB Perl was built using a "HP Internal" version of gcc that was not generally available. Update: So installing CPAN modules with C/xs components is problematic. Pure Perl CPAN modules are fine though, and I successfully installed a number of those.

    A very old version of Perl (5.004 I think) is available for the Guardian environment, though I've not used it. Guardian is not at all Unix-like (e.g. file names limited to eight characters in length with no file extension and lacking Unix-like hierarchical directories), so this is an ancient custom fork and a lot of Unix-like Perl features will necessarily be missing on Guardian.

Re: perl for HP NonStop
by flexvault (Monsignor) on Sep 21, 2011 at 10:03 UTC

    andreas1234567

    Did you try to compile a version?

    If you haven't, download a recent perl source tar-ball (5.12.2 +) and give it a try. You should have much better results with the later perl versions, and you will probably have a more stable release. Just follow the "INSTALLATION" example and give it a try.

    I did a search of a 5.12.2 dist and found some references to "NonStop-UX is now supported". But that looked like some very old documentation.

    Good Luck

    "Well done is better than well said." - Benjamin Franklin

      I don't have access to Nonstop hardware. I'm just asking if it is theoretically possible to run (any recent) perl on it.

      --
      No matter how great and destructive your problems may seem now, remember, you've probably only seen the tip of them. [1]