[MacPerl] Hello too!

[Matt Childress - 351-5698 <childress@news-gazette.com>]

At 5:47 PM +0000 12/3/96, John Phelps wrote:
>Hello!
>
>Matthias asked for answers to these from new subscribers, so here goes:


- How you learned about the existence of MacPerl
We get our work done on macs, but we -work- on an NT box as our webserver
-- at the time of purchase, NT allowed multihoming capabilities that one
couldn't get through a mac... but I digress.  There's a version of Perl for
NT, but I got tired of trying to use a 3rd party telnet program that kept
crashing on the NT box (M$ didn't supply one) to develop scripts here at
the office, so I bopped about on the net and found MacPerl


>- Whether you received your copy by ftp or by CD
   FTP

>- Whether you are using the MPW tool or the application
   the application - don't know anything about MPW.  Done some
   Apple script hacking, but no strong macintosh programming like c.
   Tho' I love the mac, I don't want my knowledge confined to the mac.
   I like perl (and esp. MacPerl) 'cuz I can use it on just about
   any system, with very little startup/learning time.
>
>- what you are planning to use Perl for
currently using it to re-arrange text from our classifieds system to put it
into a  tab delimited format for a WWW database on the NT box (it's
proprietary software, and anytime the word 'change' comes up, the figure
25k comes out).  Needless to say, it was much cheaper (and easier) to
rearrange the text from our regular output from the system.

The next MacPerl project is to rearrange editorial copy into a similar
database, and it's mostly done.  Everything worked great in MacPerl, but as
I've always said, it's the little things that make me love a Mac.  The
setup we've got on the NT box uses ODBC to connect to the text database.
But M$ made the text driver brain dead -- you can't do an update or delete
function because it's possible to make a text database without a primary
key -- ie, a unique identifier for each record.  Guess they never thought
of the fact that a date/time stamp in the first field could be considered a
primary key :-(

This means that you can't make corrections to a story on-line, which is
something I really want to be able to do.  I looked for another ODBC Text
driver, but they too were gutted. (Did I mention that trying to find this
information about the text driver took 3 days on M$ knowledgebase?).

So I see two options:

Find another text driver (not promising)

Find a way for Perl/MacPerl to write a database format that I have an ODBC
driver for.

Any hints/suggestions would be much appreciated.

Thanks!

Matt

childress@news-gazette.com
http://www.news-gazette.com/