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

[Vicki Brown <vlb@cfcl.com>]

At 10:50 -0800 7/18/98, Paul J. Schinder wrote:
>On Sat, 18 Jul 1998 11:18:31 -0800, Vicki Brown wrote:
>>
>>Did anyone notice that the Macintosh is conspicuously absent from the list
>>of mentioned platforms in the Perl 5.005 beta announcement?
>
>Why should it be there? If you try to grab the standard distribution and
>compile it under Mac OS, it won't work. The OS's mentioned in the
>announcement are the ones where 5.005 has a reasonable chance of building
>out of the box on. It's conceivable they should have mentioned Rhapsody,
>but I don't remember seeing a "make OK" for Rhapsody on p5p.

There's no reason for anyone to mention Rhapsody at the moment.  It's still
an unknown; it's either going to be enough like Free BSD to not pose an
issue or it's still an unknown.  (Yes, I'm very cynical about
Rhap^H^H^H^Hmac OS X).

>Why should it be there?

Why shouldn't it be?

>If you try to grab the standard distribution and compile it under Mac OS,
> it won't work.

Sorry. I guess I misunderstood the meaning of the beta announcement then;
it would never have occurred to me that Perl would have a reasonable chance
of building out of the box for an Amiga.  Or DOS.  Or Windows, or VMS. None
of which are Unix.

So, why are these ports part of the "standard" Perl (if that's what you're
telling me) and not Mac? They're no more Unix variants than the Mac OS.

Rich says "but there are all those toolbox calls and interface stuff".
Yes... that's what configure scripts and #defines are for. (If configure
can run on an Underwood typewriter it can run anywhere; if you now think
I'm truly fruit loops, you haven't seen the lates Perl Journal...)

Chris says:

> MacPerl will begin to move to 5.005 once perl5.005 is released, and, indeed,
> more changes on the Mac side will get rolled back to the standard
> distribution, where appropriate (for some definitions of "appropriate").

>From this I (perhaps unwisely) assumed that "more" meant some were there now.

So the next (dumb) question is, if Perl can be downloaded from the CPAN and
built without difficulty for offbeat systems like Amiga and DOS (or BeOS,
though that has faint Unixy connections, it's still offbeat) why not Mac?
What's missing, what am I not getting? Or, what aren't we doing, is there a
technical reason, is it just that Matthias is only one person who is also
trying to finish a PhD? Can we help? (Evangelism comes in many forms :-)

Am I just confused?  (I figure when I'm confused, at least a dozen other
peeople are as confused or more so :-)


Vicki Brown, vlb@cfcl.com               |\      _,,,---,,_
Journeyman Sourceror             ZZZzz /,`.-'`'    -.  ;-;;,_
Scripts & Philtres                    |,4-  ) )-,_. ,\ (  `'-'
http://www.cfcl.com/~vlb             '---''(_/--'  `-'\_)
P.O. Box 1269 San Bruno, CA  94066



***** Want to unsubscribe from this list?
***** Send mail with body "unsubscribe" to mac-perl-request@iis.ee.ethz.ch