[MacPerl] Fetch (FTP) solves the MacBinary problem!

[charles@jolt.mpx.com.au (Charles Cave)]

Fellow MacPerlers,

My response to the recent discussions on MacBinary 
and downloading the MacPerl distribution:

> MacBinary is rather old, so I doubt that Peter Lewis created
> it.  However, his Anarchie ftp program does not
> automatically decode MacBinary files.  Setting Stuffit
> Expander as a helper application for ftp transfers should
> make decoding a transparent operation.  Stuffit Expander is
> preferable to most other decoders because it will also
> uncompress most compression schemes.

I use the "Fetch" FTP client on my Macintosh, and it will
automatically handle the MacBinary format. I would have
preferred the Binhex format for distribution, because then
I could get the files through my office Internet connection
(Unix).

By way of introduction,  I use a Macintosh LC575 with 8MB
memory and System 7.1.

I have been using MacPerl 4.1.3 occasionally for the past
12 months, primarily for processing text files into
HTML documents for my web pages. I'll post some of my
programs in the next few days.

I will stay with version 4.1.3 as it appears to do everything
I want and the documentation I have is relevant:-
   Learning Perl - Randall Schwarz
   Programming Perl - Larry Wall
I downloaded 4.1.8 and then discovered from the Web pages
that droplets don't work so I was disappointed and
reverted to version 4.1.3

I really appreciate the excellent work done on the MacPerl
web pages and the various archives and articles. Well done!

I HAVE  A QUESTION:-

How can I get Macperl to talk to another application such
as Netscape of JPEGView to do something like "display this
JPEG file" or "open this URL". I would like to write
some data processing programs to massage data and then
send the results to Excel. The obvious way is to write to
a file and open it with Excel, but an interactive method
would be preferable.

I don't have Applescript on my machine.


Charles

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Charles Cave                                   Sydney, Australia
charles@jolt.mpx.com.au
http://www.ozemail.com.au/~caveman
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