Re:[MacPerl] We need more evangelism...

[John W Baxter <jwblist@olympus.net>]

At 19:53 -0500 7/19/98, Matthew Langford wrote:
>I think there might be some consensus growing that having a separate set
>of MacPerl additions + the standard distribution would be a Good Thing for
>a future goal--although I, for one, haven't felt the need to build MacPerl
>from scratch.  But that's about as close as I can see getting under the
>current MacOS.  If MacOS X _is_ SUfficiently Close To Unix (SUCTU), then
>maybe Matthias will be able to drop the IDE and work on Toolbox support.
>And MacPerl will be strikingly like Unix perl (maybe become CPAN parts).

As of now, MacOS X will run on G3 machines (and there's a faint ray of hope
for at least some 604 machines).  What will it run on when (or if) it's
actually released?  [Ignoring PowerBooks, of which there are two *series*
of G3 machines, there are already two distinct boards for the desktop G3s.
Will Apple decide that the original G3 board isn't worth bothering to
support?]  [Will Apple decide that the iMac isn't worth supporting with
MacOS X? <unlikely, but history suggests not impossible>]

Will that be a sufficiently large subset of machines that most members of
the MacPerl community will have one?  ...will have mostly such machines?

In other words, while MacOS X is potentially helpful in running Perl from
(nearly) the standard distribution, it doesn't do anything for a good
fraction of the machines which today run MacPerl.  Is the MacPerl community
willing to ask Matthias to abandon MacPerl-which-runs-on-most-Macs and work
on something else when <if> MacOS X arrives.  [There's the other issue of
what does Matthias want to work on.]

   --John
--
John Baxter   jwblist@olympus.net      Port Ludlow, WA, USA
Give a man a fish and you feed him for a day.  Teach him to fish,
and you get rid of him for the weekend.

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