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Comment by jrockway | Hacker News Reader

There are a few places where it seems to me the program would die, but they are surrounded by conditionals that are always false... so I am not sure.

I am downloading Perl 3 and am just going to run the thing.

Edit: OK, yacc is too new, make is too new, the C compiler can't understand 1989 C, etc... so I have lost interest.

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This is a good demonstration of why, if you're saving/archiving/safeguarding important code, that you save the code, the toolchain, environment and hardware. Important enough to make all that effort, anyway. Like maybe climate research code, that kind of important and long-term relevant.

I work in an archives and for the reasons you mention many archives--with the exception of various national and large-scale archives--are failing in their efforts to preserve born digital records.

It's a thorny problem, really. In many cases, we have to preserve hardware required to decode information--think u-matic tape players, 5.25" floppies, Iomega zip drives, etc.--as well as software to decode the information on the files.

Could you store VMs?

I think this poem was present in Programming Perl, 1st edition, which covers Perl 4.

Perl 4 and the book's first edition were released simultaneously, and Perl 4 was merely a version of the Perl 3 interpreter.

Depending on who you ask, this decision was either for convenience ("this book teaches Perl 4" is easier to say than "this book teaches Perl 3.numbers.here") or marketing ("look--Perl 4 came out!"), the latter sort of like Slackware's increment of version numbers from 4 to 7.

> the latter sort of like Slackware's increment of version numbers from 4 to 7

That was done because all of the other distros at the time had higher version numbers and people were looking at Slackware with a, "Well, it's only version 4. RedHat/Mandrake/etc are already on version 7!" attitude. I remember there being a written (web) justification for it.

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