Re: [MacPerl] perltk

[PVHP@LNS62.LNS.CORNELL.EDU]

Dan Griffin <dang@cs.brandeis.edu> writes 1-NOV-1996:

>This may be obvious to many of you out there, but I'm
>curious if anyone has worked out a perltk for macperl. 
>I can't seem to find any information anywhere that I've looked
>but since I believe that the parts are there, it seems possible.
>
>Thanks all!
>
>- Dan Griffin
>  dang@cs.brandeis.edu

I hope that you managed to look at my porting page at:

  http://w4.lns.cornell.edu/~pvhp/ptk/ptkPORT.html

where I tried to mention all the components one would need to assemble in order 
to give Perl/Tk a try on many computers - including Macs. One of the helpful 
modules for this MakeMaker has only recently been made available for MacPerl. I 
myself have not even had time to play with the most basic Makefile.PL script on 
a Mac so I must defer to others on the possibility of getting Tk's Makefile.PL 
to work with MacPerl. I also have no experience whatsoever with the Mac 
equivalent of Xlib.so. (I do have experience running Perl/Tk on a Sun with the 
DISPLAY set to a Mac running eXodusPowerPC - I must say that the tkweb browser 
looks quite nice on the Mac.)

One potential strategy for getting the Tk extension to perl up & running would 
be to borrow a Unix Makefile & then coerce it into the appropriate Mac 
equivalnet (MPW script???). With perl one can of course run the unix Makefile 
through all manner of filters & converters. I have even played around with such 
an approach in order to try and get Perl/Tk built on VMS (no luck there yet but 
recent changes to MM_VMS.pm seem to be headed that way - I am still hopeful :-)

One other important thing is the end-of-line "puzzle". Recent perl's have been 
experimenting with an "sfio" library that serves in place of stdio. With that 
library all the cross-platform end-of-line problems are supposed to disappear. 
sfio is distributed from att bell labs under a fairly restrictive copyright. 
But it to is well worth looking into as a development path.

I hope that extra info is of some help (you still have a lot of work to do :-(

Peter Prymmer
pvhp@lns62.lns.cornell.edu
http://w4.lns.cornell.edu/~pvhp/ptk/