Re: [MacPerl] MacPerl and MPW

[jasonj@mpx.com.au (Jason Johnston)]

Ken Simpson asked:

>What are the advantages to using MacPerl with
>MPW over just the MacPerl application?

In a word, synergy. You can easily pass arguments of any sort to MacPerl
scripts, you can combine Perl with MPW's shell language in one script, you
can use command substitution to pass the output from some other process to
your script as an argument, you can pipe, you can redirect input, output
and error -- and, quite often, you'll find that you don't need to use
MacPerl at all, or you'll use it so some other process can use its output,
because the MPW shell language is pretty powerful, plus it's very easy to
write tools in C/C++/Pascal or whatever -- so you can use each component to
do what it's best at. MacPerl itself is great, but I find it far more
useful and powerful as part of a well composed system. (And let's face it,
Perl originated on a system based on a powerful command-line shell
language, and works best in that environment: that's exactly what MPW gives
you.) Also, MPW seems very mature and stable.

(Yes, I'm a fan.)

That said, MPW has rather a large footprint (57MB on my disk), and probably
a slow learning curve. It works best if you reorganize your system a bit
around it -- eg getting rid of spaces in file names, putting an alias to
each of your applications in some folder in MPW's path (so every app
becomes an MPW 'command'), etc. (I've more or less entirely replaced the
Finder with MPW.) Not for the faint of heart, but great if you're
interested in serious productivity.

>can somebody re-post the URL?
>

ftp://dev.apple.com/devworld/Tool_Chest/ is supposed to do it, but I seem
to remember getting it by poking around Apple's web site.

>Thanks
>
>Ken
>

Jason


___________________________________
Dr Jason Johnston
mailto:jasonj@mpx.com.au
http://www.mpx.com.au/~jasonj
fax: +61 2 9519 6184 by arrangement



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