12 February 2001 This is EPL version 0.7. EPL (Emacs Perl) lets you control Emacs and XEmacs using Perl as an alternative to Emacs Lisp. EPL is a replacement for Perlmacs that uses pipes instead of embedding. This allows it to work with different Emacs, XEmacs, and Perl versions without recompilation. See http://john-edwin-tobey.org/perlmacs/ for news and the latest version. This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the GNU General Public License for more details. EPL requires at least Perl 5.004 and prefers 5.005 or higher. It is known to work with Emacs 19 (partly) and 20 and XEmacs 21, but with the caveat that Lisp references to Perl data must be freed explicitly or result in a memory leak. Under GNU Emacs 21.0.x, this restriction does not exist. I expect to get rid of it with XEmacs too someday. GNU Emacs 20 probably will always have it. INSTALLATION If you have XEmacs 21 or newer, you can install EPL as an XEmacs package. Simply create a ~/.xemacs/packages directory and unzip the most recent epl-N.NN-pkg.tar.gz file there. To view the Perl module documentation, try: perldoc -F ~/.xemacs/packages/etc/perllib/Emacs/Lisp.pm perldoc -F ~/.xemacs/packages/etc/perllib/Emacs.pm The examples should work without further ado. If you do not have XEmacs or want to install the Perl modules in standard locations, unzip the highest-numbered Emacs-EPL-N.N.tar.gz, change directory to Emacs-EPL-N.N, and run these commands: perl Makefile.PL make make install Do not run `make test' unless you have GNU Emacs 20 or higher installed. Then copy the Lisp files from the lisp directory to where Emacs looks for libraries. Byte-compile them if you like. Load perl.el in Emacs with `M-x load-file' or the equivalent. Refer to the Emacs manual for details about loading libraries and byte-compilation. See the Emacs::Lisp documentation and epl.info for further information. COPYING EPL is copyright (C) 1998-2001 by John Tobey, . You may distribute EPL under the terms of either the Perl Artistic License (as distributed with Perl 5.6.0) or the GNU General Public License. You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public License along with this program; see the file COPYING. If not, write to the Free Software Foundation, Inc., 59 Temple Place, Suite 330, Boston, MA 02111-1307 USA Enjoy! -John