Re: [MacPerl] I'm in MacWeek

[Tom Pollard <pollard@schrodinger.com>]

On Sat, 14 Jun 1997, Chris Nandor wrote:
> No, no.  MacPerl's Apple Event support is wonderful.  I said exactly that
> the INTERFACE to the Apple Events is weak.  The user/programmer interface.
> MacPerl itself, under the hood, seems to interface fine.  But it is very
> difficult for a programmer to get at the proper AppleEvents.  Prohibitvely
> difficult for most scripters, IMO.

I'd say it requires heroic effort, in fact, but at least it's there now.

Until it's easier to generate AppleEvents, I'd say it's inaccurate to call
MacPerl a "scripting language" at all.  Perl (and MacPerl) is a
full-fledged programming language, certainly.  To my way of thinking it
qualifies as a scripting language for Unix because it makes it easy to
link together other Unix programs together with the 'system' call and the
backtick notation, but on the Mac it's really only useful as a
self-contained programming language. It doesn't really work too well yet
as a way to glue other Mac applications together, and this is the essence
of what "scripting" is. 

This isn't a meant to be criticism of MacPerl.  For me, its main
attraction is that it makes it easy for me to write useful little
applications that work essentially identically on Unix and Mac systems,
and in that context it's only its capabilities as a general programming
language that matter.  It's not reasonable to expect that its scripting
aspects will translate from Mac to Unix, because the other applications
you'd be scripting are just fundamentally not going to be the same.

For MacPerl to become a useful scripting language for the Mac, I think
it's basically going to have to become an AppleScript interpreter in
addition to what it is now.  AppleScript is the closest thing on the Mac
to a command line interface and it's the common language which all Mac
applications speak.  If you accept that, then it would make sense for the
'system' command and the backtick notation to interpret their arguments as
AppleScript in MacPerl.  

That's my two cents, anyway.

Cheers,

Tom

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W. Thomas Pollard                                  Schrodinger, Inc.
pollard@schrodinger.com                       http://www.schrodinger.com/
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