[MacPerl-Toolbox] A Text Editor in (Mac)Perl (was: beginner's q...

[Brian McNett <webmaster@mycoinfo.com>]

<robinmcf@altern.org> wrote;
> The only thing as I said I would *really* like to see, is an editor written
> in Perl, hopefully combined with your glue modules Chris, which,IMHO,
> would simply make this discussion beyond redundant.

Well, this is where porting the WASTE library API comes in.  At the 
moment, you can't very well write a text-editor in MacPerl that doesn't 
have TextEdit's 32K limitation on it.  Not that you couldn't do it, just 
that you couldn't do it very well!  It would require a lot of reinventing 
of the wheel.

However, I'm only providing the tools to build such a beast.  Even this 
is a stretch of my meager ability.  Actually writing any more than a demo 
editor is WAY beyond me.

Which means it's time for...

WASTE Status report:

The XS needs a LOT of hand editing.  It's pretty (ugly) raw code at the 
moment, with no comments or POD.  The function calls are probably not yet 
in quite the right format.  Functions which do things identically to 
TextEdit tend to be called slightly differently, and I still don't have a 
complete table of corresponding calls.

I can't even SPELL ahlpa, so requests for the actual code will be met 
with severe caveats about the lack of any real useabilty at this point.  
Wanting to see the source will be taken as a request to offer assistance!

There are 99 public functions in WASTE, and it seems that only constant 
exported is WASTE_VERSION.  I expect that WETrackDrag, WEReceiveDrag, and 
WECanAcceptDrag will be disabled until a preliminary module for the Drag 
Manager is available.  The WASTE source contains such a library, and an 
API in C, but I can only handle one job at a time.

WASTE is styled by default, so TextEdit's calls for creating a styledText 
box are not duplicated  WENew() brings up a new instance of a styled 
editor.  If you don't want styled text, you probably don't want WASTE.

WASTE digs deep into the Mac ToolBox for its functionality (much like 
TextEdit).  Expect dependencies on QuickDraw and QDOffScreen as a matter 
of course.

For those that weren't present for the earlier discusson on this topic, 
I'm emphatically 
*not* re-building MacPerl around WASTE, just an interface to the shared 
library which can be called *from* MacPerl.  I simply don't wish to spend 
the amount of time in C required to build MacPerl from the sources, and 
doing a one-for-one replacement of all TextEdit calls with WASTE calls is 
a MAJOR job, and requires expertise I simply don't have.

I'd re-iterate that C is one of the seven computer languages I've failed 
to learn, but with near constant exposure, learning is finally starting 
to occur.  Eventually, people will start to think I'm kidding when I say 
that. ;-)

--B

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