Which language will do?

[nmeyers at javalinux.net (Nathan Meyers)]

On Mon, Dec 02, 2002 at 03:36:19PM -0500, Jared Michaels wrote:
> I guess I need to be a little clearer -- I'm looking to create a 
> stand-alone document reader, not a web-based application. Something that 
> could fit on a CD, or installed from a CD, or downloaded as a Zip and 
> installed that way.
> 
> Nathan: Yes, PHP would be my preference, but it is, of course, 
> server-based. I've tried a PHP compiler, the only php compiler I've found, 
> but it doesn't want to work on Win2k.

Ah... guess I didn't grok that.

> Brian: No, I haven't tried Perl. Does Perl work for stand-alone apps?

I'm not Brian, but the answer is yes. Perl was a local scripting language
long before the WWW took off, and implementations are available for just
about any platform you can get your hands on.

It's not clear to me what sort of front end you're looking for on this
script. Are you looking for this script to run a GUI, to act as a local
Web server, to scroll out text pages, or something else entirely? Among
Perl's zillions of contributed libraries are components that'll let you
solve any or all of the above.

Nathan