How can I use X with Perl?

    Right now, you have several choices.  You can wait for perl5, use
    the WAFE or STDWIN packages, or try to make your own usub bindings. 

    Perl5 is anticipated to be released with bindings for X, called 
    guiperl.  An exciting prototype for this, written by Jon Biggar
    <jon@netlabs.com>, Larry's *other* brother-in-law and officemate, 
    is already up and running inside of Netlabs.  This program addresses
    the same dynamic gui-building problem space as does tcl/tk.
    
    If you can't wait or don't think that guiperl will do what you want,
    a stab at Motif bindings was begun by Theodore C. Law
    <TEDLAW@TOROLAB6.VNET.IBM.COM> area.  His article about this is 
    on convex.com in /pub/perl/info/motif for anon ftp.

    STDWIN is a library written by Guido van Rossum <guido@cwi.nl>
    (author of the Python programming language) that is portable 
    between Mac, Dos and X11.  One could write a Perl agent to
    speak to this STDWIN server.

    WAFE is a package that implements a symbolic interface to the Athena
    widgets (X11R5). A typical Wafe application consists in our framework
    of two parts: the front-end (we call it Wafe for Widget[Athena]front
    end) and an application program running typically as separate process.
    The application program can be implemented in an arbitrary programming
    language and talks to the front-end via stdio.  Since Wafe (the
    front-end) was developed using the extensible TCL shell (cite John
    Ousterhout), an application program can dynamically submit requests to
    the front-end to build up the graphical user interface; the
    application can even down-load application specific procedures into
    the front-end.  The distribution contains sample application programs
    in Perl, GAWK, Prolog, TCL, and C talking to the same Wafe binary.
    Many of the demo applications are implemented in Perl.  Wafe 0.9 can
    be obtained via anonymous ftp from 
        ftp.wu-wien.ac.at:pub/src/X11/wafe-0.9.tar.Z
    (for people without name server: the ip address is 137.208.3.5)

    Alternatively, you could use wish from tcl. 

    #!/usr/local/bin/perl
    #####################################################################
    #  An example of calling wish as a subshell under Perl and
    #  interactively communicating with it through sockets.
    #
    #  The script is directly based on Gustaf Neumann's perlwafe script.
    #
    #  Dov Grobgeld dov@menora.weizmann.ac.il
    #  1993-05-17
    #####################################################################

    $wishbin = "/usr/local/bin/wish";

    die "socketpair unsuccessful: $!!\n" unless socketpair(W0,WISH,1,1,0);
    if ($pid=fork) {
            select(WISH); $| = 1;
            select(STDOUT);

        # Create some TCL procedures
            print WISH 'proc echo {s} {puts stdout $s; flush stdout}',"\n";

        # Create the widgets
        print WISH <<TCL;
        # This is a comment "inside" wish

        frame .f -relief raised -border 1 -bg green
        pack append . .f {top fill expand}

        button .f.button-pressme -text "Press me" -command {
            echo "That's nice."
        }
        button .f.button-quit -text quit -command {
            echo "quit"
        }
        pack append .f .f.button-pressme {top fill expand} \\
                       .f.button-quit {top expand}

TCL
        ;
        # Here is the main loop which receives and sends commands
        # to wish.
        while (<WISH>) {
            chop;
            print "Wish sais: <$_>\n";
            if (/^quit/) { print WISH "destroy .\n"; last; }
        }
            wait;
    } elsif (defined $pid) {
        open(STDOUT, ">&W0");
        open(STDIN, ">&W0");
        close(W0);
        select(STDOUT); $| = 1;
        exec "$wishbin --";
    } else {
        die "fork error: $!\n";
    }