Perl/Basics/Development environment
To develop in perl you will need only a perl interpreter and a text editor. For those of you who find un highlighted perl, there are a variety of windows & linux text editors with syntax highlighting support.
Windows:
- notepad++
- cygwin's vim implementation
- gvim for windows
Linux:
- vim
- nano
- emacs
- geany
- gedit
Linux & Unix
On most distributions, perl and cpan come bundled by default. In the case it is not, a simple apt-get, emerge, yum install, pacman, or any other package manager should install it quickly. You can determine if perl is installed by typing `which perl' at the bash command line. If a filename is returned, you're good to go.
Windows
You can do everything we're going over by installing perl on cygwin. CYGWIN is available at http://www.cygwin.com/install.html
For compilation to .exe, we recommend "pp", you can install this by `typing cpan -i pp' from your cygwin shell.
There is also a perl implementation for Windows written by activestate, searching for "activestate perl" in any search engine will find it.
CPAN
CPAN is the module and package installer for perl. It can be accessed on most distributions simply by typing `cpan'. On windows, you can access it by typing `cpan' in your CYGWIN shell. Note: If `cpan' does not work, try `perl -e 'shell' -mCPAN'. If this does not work, your installation may be broken.
