TO: Troy Pearse FROM: Jason Evans (UI CS481 team B) SUBJECT: HP Perl support and project concerns DATE: September 20, 1996 Mr. Pearse, In our CS481 team meeting with you on September 12, we discussed possible languages the conditional compilation logic analyzer could be written in. It was decided that Perl is a viable option, provided that our code is compatible with the version of Perl available at HP. We have tested our existing code on the three versions of the Perl interpreter that we have at UI: v4.036, v5.001, and v5.002. Our code runs correctly with no modifications on versions 5.001 and 5.002. We can also, if necessary make it compatible with version 4.036 without losing functionality or features. Perl 5.x simply makes variable scope and type checking more versatile and robust than in Perl 4.x. We recommend the use of Perl for this project. We understand that your group at HP is very familiar with shell scripts. Perl is a scripting language and is in many ways similar to shell scripts. Understanding the code will not require a major effort. Perl provides impressive power in data handling, list operations, formatted file I/O, extended regular expression matching, and code structure. These strengths, we believe, lend themselves very favorably to the design and implementation of the product you require. Another issue of the project is the format of the graphical output. Given that there will be graphical output, we believe that PostScript is the logical, most usable format. PostScript tools and printer drivers are widely accessible. PostScript also provides versatility for displaying information. Images can be readily scaled to virtually any page size, can be tiled across multiple pages for large images, and is a standard format which is very portable. We would like your approval to use both Perl and PostScript. The resulting product will be robust, very functional, and reasonably portable within Unix environments. Please consider these points and let us know of your decision. Sincerely, Jason Evans Team Leader UI CS481 Team B evans911@cs.uidaho.edu