[MacPerl] MacPerl5.06r1m Plain Text foul up

[bob.dalgleish@sasknet.sk.ca (Bob Dalgleish)]

I have been trying to develop/debug a droplet using BBEdit 3.5 as my editor
and AppleScript scripts to fire up MacPerl as needed.  At one point, I
saved the text file as a droplet, and tested its operation under live fire
(it converts mailboxes into tab-separated-value format).  After some
feedback, I saved the droplet as Plain Text and proceeded to revise it from
BBEdit.

Imaging my surprise when one of the changes I had instituted consistently
failed to appear in the resulting output!

After some detective work, I discovered that MacPerl was interpreting the
script tucked away in the TEXT resource, while I had been editing the data
fork.  This is bad.  This is very bad.  Either MacPerl has to save a file
as Plain Text and mean it (i.e., strip the TEXT resource from the file), or
it has to interpret the data fork of files of type TEXT.  Any other
interpretation strategy leads to the execution of "secret" code.

Bob Dalgleish   bob.dalgleish@sasknet.sk.ca
Web Page        http://www.sasknet.com/~dalgl/