Win32 Perl Programming: The Standard Extensions, Second Edition

History of Win32 Perl

Win32 platforms started to ship with a command processor that was modified to perform more complicated functions. These modifications, however, were far from sufficient for most administrators. It wasn’t until Microsoft contracted with Dick Hardt’s team at Hip Communications to port Perl to the Win32 platform that administrators had any hope of a decent freeware scripting utility. It was 1995 when the early versions of the Win32-compatible version of Perl started to find their way onto machines across the globe.

Not only did Hip Communications’ Win32 Perl provide most of the functionality of the UNIX flavors of Perl, it also extended itself into the Win32 API. This provided an interface into the Win32-specific world of ...