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

[online@mactech.com (Jeff at MacTech)]

In article <mac-perl.l03102805b1d6a5dcb17a@[208.206.119.39]>, David Turley
<dturley@pobox.com> wrote:

>Two cents added by me:
>
>Personally, what I like about Perl is the fact that I can write a script to
>run some mundane task (like when someone gives me a PhotoCD with a few
>hundred images, and says we need a few hundred web pages with these photos
>added to our site tomorrow) and I can move that script and run it one
>either on my desktop mac or my windoze laptap. Should I ever be so
>fortunate as Paul S. to have a Linux box, well, the scripts will run there.

I agree--this is one of the things which I like best about perl. To look
at it another way, if I am forced to work on a Win machine, then if I am
programming in Perl I am producing programs which will run on my Mac, or
if I need to write something to be used on Win machines then I can have
the pleasure of doing the development on my Mac.

>I have little use for the toolbox modules or even the Win specific tools,

I shudder to say this aloud, but I'll bet that many of the Toolbox modules
would compile for Windows, by virtue of the QuickTime Media Layer (which
implements an alarming amount of the Mac toolbox on Win). If there were a
QuickTime for Unix, then the Toolbox modules might form an alternative to
Tk as a cross-platform GUI. (It's a shame that Tk support for the Mac has
been put on pause.)

>I would love to see standard perl build out of the box for Mac, like it
>does on windows.

One thing which will prevent this from happening completely (I would
imagine) is that since the Mac lacks a command line, there needs to be
code included in the Mac version to put up and maintain the standard
output window. This code is by its very nature platform-specific, and
since it is completely unneeded on Unix or Windows machines it would be
out of place in the standard distribution--it would be a non-trivial
amount of code.

A few other tidbits:

Has anyone tried building Perl under Rhapsody/DR2? I heard from one person
that the standard Perl distribution doesn't work, but I don't know how
hard he tried. Also, from what I gathered at Macworld the plan is that in
the consumer release of OS X the command-line won't be accessible (but
will be using the dev tools). If this is so, then we'll still need
MacPerl, or something like it, under OS X (althought the porting may be
much easier).

Question: Does the standard Perl dist. build under MkLinux, or only under
LinuxPPC? (Just curious.)

Also, since Vicki brought it up, Be is definitely built on top of a Unix,
although I don't remember if it is BSD, so that's probably why it is
mentiond in the Perl 5.005 beta announcement (altough it still would have
been appropriate to mention the Mac, since they say, "If you find that
your platform is unsupported, do let us know.").

Well, that was my 4 cents.
-- 
__________________________________________________________________________

Jeff Clites                Online Editor           http://www.MacTech.com/
online@MacTech.com         MacTech Magazine
__________________________________________________________________________

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