My policy is not to sell or distribute anything I don't own outright,
meaning I don't distribute anything I didn't create personally
(otherwise, it might seem like selling it even if all I did was
include it free with my product.) But when customers ask where they
can obtain vi or perl, I do suggest the following sources, which I
have checked and verified as reliable:


vi
--
vi, in the form of vim (Vi Improved), written by Bram Moolenar (moo@oce.nl),
is available as what Bram calls "charityware" (meaning if you like it, he
hopes you'll make a donation to orphans in Uganda).  You can get the Win32
x86 version (there are others for Alpha, MIPS and PPC as well) by ftp from:

   ftp://ftp.oce.nl/pub/misc/vim/pc/vim45w32.zip

The vim home page is

   http://www.math.fu-berlin.de/~guckes/vim

There's also a vim FAQ maintained by Laurent Duperval at

   http://www.grafnetix.com/~laurent/vim/faq.html

I have several customers who swear by vim.  I use it also and, in my
tests, it appears to be MUCH faster and more reliable than the commercial
alternatives.


perl
----
To my knowledge, there is still only one root codebase for perl, the one
written and still being enhanced by Larry Wall.  Microsoft did pay for a port
to be done to NT and distributes it on the NT Resource Kit (which most
serious developers already have).  It's in source form only on the CD but
the makefile is there and VC++ runs it w/o problems.  You can also ftp
the entire Resource Kit free from

   http://www.microsoft.com/msdownload/bork.htm

(Sorry, MS does not offer, to my knowledge, a way to download just perl.)

But an even better place to find it is at the Perl for Win32 home page:

   http://www.perl.hip.com

This is guaranteed to give you always the very latest build of perl for
Win32 available anywhere.  And it's free.




Douglas A. Hamilton
Hamilton Laboratories
