Perl might have started out as a text processing language, but why
shouldn't it expand into all domains of data processing?

One of the challenges of developing event driven applications is
tweaking all your libraries to use the same event loop.  This is
especially difficult when no standand perl event loop exists.

I hereby present the Event extension.

Event has been in development since April 1998.  It is known to build
correctly on the following architectures. Most unix architectures
should work with minor tweaking.

             linux 2.2.1 ppc-linux 
             linux 2.2.5-15 i686-linux 
             sunos 4.1.4 sun4-sunos 
             solaris 2.5.1 sun4-solaris
             solaris 2.6 sun4-solaris
             solaris 7 i86pc-solaris 

* Perl 5.005_03 (or better) is required.

* Win32 support should not be too difficult but no volunteer has
stepped forward to take ownership.

* No real additional support is needed or planned for multiple threads.

Event has been tested with Insure++.

Since there is only really need for a single event loop API, there is
tentitive demand for including this extension as part of the main
perl distribution.  Therefore, I would like to encourage everyone to
try it out and send any feedback to the mailing list at
perl-loop@perl.org.

Thank you very much!

Joshua N Pritikin
15 Jul 1999
