Re: [MacPerl] graphics with MacPerl

[pudge@pobox.com (Chris Nandor)]

At 11.21 9/1/97, valere wrote:
>Anthony David wrote:
>> I take it you plan to port GD to Macperl?
>
>What? You mean I can't just ftp it and run it? Why "porting"? isn't perl
>just totally portable ? (modulo unix system calls)

Perl, IDEALLY, is totally portable.  But there is something called an XS
interface to Perl, where you can compile libraries in C for plugging into
the core, either statically or dynamically.  Those extensions, being
written in C, are not totally portable.

Besides, there are platform-specific Perl methods.  exec() doesn't work on
a Mac.  AppleEvents don't work on Unix (yet).  Etc.

HOWEVER, as Alan Fry pointed out, GD has already been ported to MacPerl and
is included in the standard distribution.  Please feel free to just use GD,
don't worry about compiling it.  It's already been done.

At 13.47 9/1/97, Richard Rathe wrote:
>It is my understanding that Perl was designed NOT to be portable in the
>sense that various implementations are encouraged to use "native" aspects
>of the particular OS. On the Mac this includes the ":" directory delimiter
>and the 1904 (?) base for time calculations.

I don't think that is the proper interpretation of the various OS
differences.  Perl IS supposed to be portable and cross-platform.  But it
is also supposed to base itself on the standard OS libraries and functions
available to it.

Perhaps we should mark script and modules that don't use the
platform-specific stuff as 100% Pure Perl?  ;-)

--
Chris Nandor             pudge@pobox.com             http://pudge.net/
%PGPKey=('B76E72AD',[1024,'0824 090B CE73 CA10  1FF7 7F13 8180 B6B6'])



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