[MacPerl] MacPerl as an OSA language

[Matthias Ulrich Neeracher <neeri@iis.ee.ethz.ch>]

Vicki Brown writes:
>Maybe Matthias would tell us again the reasons why the "Make MacPerl 100%
>OSAX compliant" project ran aground?  Maybe more of us we have incentive
>now to find the answers to some of those problems?

Basically, OSA is based on packaging the entire language into a QuickTime
component, which is unpleasant at least and entirely impracticable with complex
languages like MacPerl (which need lots of memory and dynamic loading). My
original project of wrapping MacPerl, AppleScript style, into a component,
therefore never became stable enough.

Now that a multithreaded MacPerl is on its way, however, I see a Frontier-style
implementation (with a small component delegating script requests to a
multithreaded application) as a promising possibility.

> Can we help?  $300 a year buys a lot of help.

Many of you are already helping by unburdening me of feeling responsible for
most of the support questions and by improving the documentation (which both
raises interest in MacPerl and simplifies support). At the moment I don't know
whether I could use the help of others in the core development of the
multithreaded Perl engine (nor, frankly, whether I'd *want* that help :-), so
the most effective and practicable[*] further help, I suppose, would be for
others to take over more of the MacPerl infrastructure (mailing lists, possibly
a small news server, possibly an ftp site for contribution material).

Matthias
[*] there are, of course, various impracticable help ideas: Get me a Nobel
Price / MacArthur grant / Nike product endorsement, and I'll be able to
do full-time work on MacPerl. 

-- 
Matthias Neeracher   <neeri@iis.ee.ethz.ch>   http://www.iis.ee.ethz.ch/~neeri
  "Of course a certain number of scientists have to go mad, just to keep the
   tradition alive" -- Matt Ruff, _Fool on the Hill_

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