Re: [MacPerl] UNIX "system" command

["Thomas R. Kimpton" <tkimpton@maned.com>]

On Tue, 29 Jul 1997 14:08:52 -0700, Vicki Brown <vlb@apple.com> wrote:
[stuff deleted]
>This brings up an interesting (IMNSHO :-) point I've noticed.  I do much of
>my Perl programming on the Mac.  And, until I needed to write programs on
>the Mac, I wrote all of my UNIX scripts in shell, awk, sed, ...  That's
>what I'd been doing for 10 years and I had no need to change. Then, one
>day, I had to do some massive data filtering exercise; it was a choice of
>MacPerl or Excel macros. (No contest; the choice took about a picosecond to
>make :-)

I think I discovered perl in 1990 on unix.  Until then I used
shell/awk/sed/grep/etc scripts for everything on unix.  When
I discovered perl I felt I had become one of the "Chosen Ones" :-),
and never wrote another non-perl script, evangelizing the "One
True" scripting language to my poor beknighted colleagues, winning
many willing converts.

[stuff deleted]
>
>I guess I'm wondering about other folks on this list.  Do those of you who
>spend most of your time on the Mac find yourselves not even thinking about
>things like system() and "open ...|" ?  How many of us work on UNIX and
>Mac?  Do the Mac's limitations (I work at Apple; I can call them
>limitations :-) affect your Perl coding style?
>
[stuff deleted]

I have a mac box on my desk and unix accounts available.  I bought
my first Mac in 1985, getting a compiler at the same time. I've been
using Unix since '83, and worked in an Unix OS group the latter half
of the '80s.  Both have been in my fingers and head since.
I use the MPW perl tool almost exclusively.  Thus my PERL coding
tends towards the Unix style.  If I want to do things that require
piped type commands that aren't available on the Mac, I do them
on a unix box (ftping the data back and forth is no chore, dragging
and dropping with Anarchie :-).  Otherwise, output from the MPW perl
tool can be piped to whatever tools I want in the MPW shell.  Lately
I've started using more of the toolbox calls that have been made
available.  The only thing I can think of that would improve the
way I use perl would be to have perl replace MPW's command interpreter.
Ah... *that* would be grand! :-)

Looking more closely at your question, I think I tend to make my
perl programs as self contained as possible, and not using pipes
or systems in them, even on unix (except possibly at the end, or
beginning of the program).

Tom.

Tom Kimpton
--
Mrs. Bun: Have you got anything without spam?
Waitress: Well, there's spam egg sausage and spam, that's not got
much spam in it.
Mrs. Bun: I don't want any spam!



***** Want to unsubscribe from this list?
***** Send mail with body "unsubscribe" to mac-perl-request@iis.ee.ethz.ch