Re: Perl

["Gary W. Billings"<obs681@telusplanet.net>]

>Can I get directly at the hardware under perl?  The thing I still like 
>about QBasic is that I can do operations on the ISA bus.  I can also read 

>and write to the serial port.  As a hardware guy, these are things that I 

>like to do.  So can I get to the PCI, ISA, and the serial ports under 
>perl?  I am quite willing to assign them permanently to one user.
>
>Tom Droege

I'm not sure, and don't have my reference materials available.  I think the
answer is "no".  

However, I was looking at a similar problem a little while ago, and the route
that I planned to take (but didn't proceed) was to write daemon/drivers in C,
that *could* talk to hardware, and have them communicate with a user-friendly
GUI interface (written using perl/Tk) via sockets (perl has all the infrastructure
for this).  This gave the added advantage that the driver and the GUI do not
have to be on the same machine, or run on the same OS.  For me, this was attractive
as I was going to use a lightly-loaded low-end machine to talk to hardware,
and put the GUI and image / data manipulation on another workstation. 

Gary Billings