Re: [MacPerl] Shuck, AS, Perl, whatever, Pt 3.

[Matthias Ulrich Neeracher <neeri@iis.ee.ethz.ch>]

guinn@mail.utexas.edu (Tim Guinn) writes:
>At 15:32 pm on 03.01.97 Bart Lateur <bart.mediamind@tornado.be> said:
>>Shuck doesn't use html, but a vaguely comparable file format, known as
>>"pod" (Pages Of Description). It is a rather widely accepted format on
>>Unix systems.
>
>Mmmm, I think it's 'Plain Old Documentation'?

Yes, and it's widely accepted *within* the Perl community but not on
Unix in general. Furthermore, on most platforms, pod is translated
into either HTML or troff for viewing.

>>BTW, although I'm not a native English speaker, I think there's
>>something wrong with the idea of a corn cob. The word "pod" rather makes
>>me think of beans or peas, not corn. Am I wrong?

Technically correct, I believe, but aw shucks, I was just doing some free
associatin'.

>I'm no farmer-botanist, but I think corn/beans/peas are all in the same
>family of plants.

Possibly, if you define "family" loosely enough. My initial association
came about from searching alternatives to "pod" in my online thesaurus.
"Shuck" struck me as the phonetically most down-to-earth alternative.

>Okay, I'm probably wrong. But I think Matthias' intent
>was in using the word in the sense of either:
>
>   1. shuck - (v) act of removing the husk (outer covering) of corn

Right, that was part of the intent...

>      ...in that the application doesn't have all the feature-bloat
>      of common browsers that you mention.

... but the intent was rather that Shuck would shuck the pod syntax to
allow people to get at the tasty insides of pod files.

My visual association to this concept was a semi-peeled corncob, so
Shuck came to its icon.

>It's a great application, though. My only complaint (and that's really
>too strong a word) is that the Go => Lookup... menu item uses CMD-H,
>rather than CMD-F, which I've always thought was the MacOS user interface
>standard for doing a Search/Find.

The reason for Command-H was that Shuck is optimized for switching back and
forth with MacPerl, where Command-H is the "Help Lookup" key, so I found it
convenient to have the same key in Shuck.

However, I've now addressed your objection by making "F" the official key
and "H" and "L" undocumented alternatives.

Matthias

-----
Matthias Neeracher   <neeri@iis.ee.ethz.ch>   http://www.iis.ee.ethz.ch/~neeri
   "What is the search for the next great compelling application but a
    search for the human identity?"        -- Douglas Coupland, _Microserfs_