It seemed a good place to start: small but feature-rich. I'm looking at Perl 3 now and deciding if I "need" binary ops and sockets. At the moment, I think I can survive without both, but we will see.
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It seemed a good place to start:[...]
What I'm really wondering is what you are trying to accomplish. Usually, posts in 'Cool uses for Perl' tell you what the use is. Compiling old versions of Perl is interesting but why? Are you planning to create your own new language? Are you targeting a microcontroller or embedded system of some sort? Are you planning to embed it in Lua and then embed that Lua into Perl? A game engine?
It would be interesting if there were a repository for all the old versions of Perl.
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Old versions are easy to find. What do you mean by "a repository"? Just a location where the distribution tar-balls are available or a location that has binary packages for your system?
Also note that old(er) versions of perl are not easy to build/compile on recent machines with recent operation systems. Of course there is Devel::PatchPerl, but manual intervention might be needed to get to something that works.
The only good reason I see for keeping (or even building) old(er) versions of perl is that you want to test your distribution to all supported versions of perl that you claim to support. That is why I have over 200 versions of perl on a USB disk. (perl2 is not one of them, perl1 is :)
Enjoy, Have FUN! H.Merijn
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Response to another post: I've "forked" the Perl2 source here: https://github.com/bobbyjim/perl2
PURPOSE/REASON. I'm shy about this question because mainly this is -Ofun, and therefore not necessarily practical, but these are the thoughts tip-toeing through my mind:
Because It's Perl -- But It's Not (BIP-BIN). Wikipedia says that Perl is a family of "two" languages. But really one could argue, perhaps perversely, that there are three languages accounted for... if you include Early Perl. Regardless of its perversity, I feel that resuscitating a Small Perl could be fun and even useful for me. I could potentially Dockerize it, using them for a strange kind of microservice (an interesting and amusing exercise since it seems that Perl2 doesn't really have sockets). (I note that "no sockets" means it won't do CGI). Even a source code renovation could be fun, instructive, and even useful. Some of the Perl2 code is just not needed; how much?
I don't know. I want to find out. I want to try it.
My Edification. Every year I go through phases in programming. I'm currently in the "bytecode interpreters are interesting" phase, and (re-)learning about them. Perl2 is a great case study in an interpreted language that's not-as-big-as-Perl5.
Because It's Small. I like minimal-but-effective things, and Perl2 qualifies. I do think about Docker images and microcontrollers and circuitPerl and the need for tiny binaries. But mainly it's small enough to wrap my brain around it.
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Earliest available version?
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