Re: [MacPerl] MacOS 8.5 Sherlock modules (partly-baked idea)

[Brian "L." Matthews <blm@halcyon.com>]

Rich Morin writes:
|That said, what
|chance might there be to craft Sherlock modules in MacPerl?

As I understand it, Sherlock modules aren't any kind of executable code,
they're just descriptions of how to send a query and parse the results,
so writing Sherlock modules in MacPerl doesn't really make sense.

However, as Sherlock is really just a clever web browser, it should be
possible to replace the Sherlock application with a MacPerl script. To
replicate Sherlock, the script would have to parse Sherlock modules and
talk to a web server. The talking to a web server part is trivial, and I
suspect parsing a Sherlock module wouldn't be too hard in perl. Writing
such a script would make it easy to extend Sherlock beyond just writing
modules, and, although I don't know a lot about the Sherlock application,
I'd bet perl is better at parsing replies than Sherlock is. You could also
probably maintain some sort of state, so you could get more than 10
AltaVista results, for example. Using Sherlock's file system index might
be the hard part, unless it's been documented.

Or, I may have no idea what I'm talking about...

Brian

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