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Re: [MacPerl] When is \r really \n in MacPerl!?

At 11:05 AM -0500 2/10/98, Chris Nandor wrote:
>At 10.33 1998.02.10, Mark F. Murphy wrote:
>>Just for the record, I converted over a script which auto determines the
>>line feed seperator for a data file.  It broke under MacPerl because of
>>these escaped chars being reversed.  So now I must use \x0D\x0A instead if
>>I want to program around MacPerl's difference in the Perl community.
>
>So you want MacPerl to write text files in non-Mac format?  That makes no
>sense to me.

No... *read* *read* *read*.  Not write.  Though, sense perl is a general
tool used across many platforms, it makes sense to want to use perl to
write data in many different formats.

>\n is defined as "local line separator," not "Unix line separator."

Would you like to provide us all with where you got that definition from?
In every programming book I own, it says "newline".  Depending on what
terminal one is on, that could mean many things.

>It does what it is meant to do.  If you want to determine
>exactly \012, then don't use \n.  It is *wrong*.

I can see the ambiguity of \n... though it's always wise to use it as the
world understands it.  BBEdit understand what \n is..... so does
Codewarrior.  Since BBEdit and Codewarrior deal with cross platform issues,
they make sure to do the right thing.

Anything less in MacPerl just makes the Mac community look loony.... not to
mention going aginat the basic Mac philosophy of doing the "right thing"
for the user (as BBEdit and Codewarrior do).

>At 10.25 1998.02.10, Mark F. Murphy wrote:
>>I do plenty of development on the Mac... and it doesn't make "sense" to
>>switch around common escape characters that are pretty well defined in the
>>ascii namespace.
>
>No, \n is not a defined ASCII character.  That is where you are mistaken.

It has a translation in most programming langauges which use these escape
sequences to a particular ASCII character.

>You don't know what you are talking about.  This has been discussed at
>length, and no, there is no good way to do it at the moment.  If you think
>it can, the source is available; do it yourself and submit a patch.

You bet your *ss!

I'm in the process... it's not the highest priority on my plate.

However, I want perl to be a *full* level player on the Mac.  I want it to
do the *right* thing.  The current implmentation of perl on the Mac does
not do the right thing.

One can't even talk about these issues on this forum without someone
chanting the matra "It can't be done".  About the only thing I've been able
to tell is that teh developer isn't interested in spending any more time on
this particular issue.... not that it *can't* be done.

>I am trying not to flame here, but you are being insulting and hardheaded
>about something that has already been gone over before, you continue to
>assert your error is correct, and Matthias last time sent a lengthy post
>about why it is the way it is and about how this discussion is OVER, not to
>be brought up again.  Please do NOT respond to the list about this.  I am
>resending Matthias' previous post.

Well... we'll see what the *market* has to say about it.

I dream of a day when someone will be able to get a perl script from a unix
system and it will just *work* on the Mac (with respect to line endings and
the like).  No application mem limit... no single script at a time limit...
etc.

It's not that it can't be done... it's that Matthias doesn't have the time
(or the inclination) to do so from what I can tell from the posts I've read.

And... it's only insulting if some of you aren't open to talk about ideas
and ways to *make* it happen.

But the best proof is to do it oneself... and that's what I intend to do.

But tell me this... what do we do in the Mac perl community when we have 2
perls for the Mac!?

I can hear the screams now...

mark

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 Mark F. Murphy, Director Software Development   <mailto:markm@tyrell.com>
 Tyrell Software Corp                            <http://www.tyrell.com>
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