It may not be a fully-supported technology by HP’s standards, but the HP 3000 Perl implementation has the same things going for it as the one that is fully supported by HP on HP-UX. (HP was waiting on the HP-UX support to get organized last year before announcing Perl would become part of the 3000's Fundamental Operating System. The announcements of last November must have had an impact on that official support.)

Nonetheless, the scripting language used to enable many a Web site has the enthusiasm and support of an open source community on both platforms. Perl advocate Ken Hirsch posted notice that a pair of new Perl features for 3000 sites are now available — MPE::Process, which allows you to run a few process intrinsics from Perl, and the related MPE::Spoonfeed, which feeds commands to son processes. MPE::Spoonfeed depends on MPE::Process, MPE::File, and MPE::CIvar. All of the modules are available on the comprehensive Perl clearinghouse CPAN, for most reliable installation (www.cpan.org), as well as on Hirsch’s Invent3K server home page, http://invent3k.external.hp.com/~KEN.HIRSCH/