I wrote the teeny cpan command line script that comes with perl. I just realized that it also comes with Mac OS X Panther (and probably Jaguar).
That is cool. I never really thought about it until I had to install perl on my new PowerBook today.
When they shipped the product to the first alpha customers, they included that tool for feedback. And it stayed in through production. As far as I can tell, my little quick few-dozen line shell script continued life through the end of the Sequent product (and company).
And then there was the time that I noticed that there was no "pretty printer" for Emacs Lisp data forms. So I hacked one out, and posted it to the mailling list equivalent of the CPAN for little Emacs hacks. A year later, I got email from RMS asking for permission to include pp.el into the core distro. A year after that, when I invoked "M-x gnus" for the first time, I saw "Loading pp.el...", and gasped. My little hack had come full circle.
Be careful what little hack you write... it may persist to the end of time. {grin}
Temporary solutions are the most permanent ones.
You and your silly "standard perl". BAH![pudge@bourque pudge]$ which cpan
/usr/local/bin/cpan
