Re: [MacPerl] A command line shell for the Mac ?

[Vicki Brown <vlb@cfcl.com>]

At 21:22 -0700 8/16/99, John W Baxter wrote:
> At 9:58 +1000 8/17/99, Charles Cave wrote:
>>Has anyone ever written a shell in MacPerl to emulate the Unix shell?
>>[My background is Unix]
>
> Apple, released about 1986 and still (a) being developed and (b) being
>used
> within and without Apple.

MPW is written in C (not Perl).
MPW was released a bit later than 1987.
MPW does not "emulate Unix" (although it has a bizarre sort of toe-stubbing
familiarity about it for those who know Unix :)

>
> For whatever reason, MPW uses different names for things than Unix does.

because they didn't want you to think they were copying anything from Unix.
Apple has had a most uneasy relationship with Unix for a loooong time.

> For the most part, the differences can be covered over using command
> aliases.

heh heh heeeeeeeeeee :-)

I wouldn't recommend you try it; life is too short.

> The regular expression syntax is very different...I didn't know the
> Unix-based syntax, so that didn't bother me.  The MPW form pretty much
>does
> away with leaning toothpick syndrome (at the cost of a bunch of
> option-whatever characters, some of which are used outside regular

Well, yeah. Leaning-toothpick syndrome is the prevalence of \/ in the
expression. Since MPW doesn't treat / as a path separator, MPW by
definition does not suffer from leaning-toothpick syndrome (regardless of
metacharacter selection in regexes :-)

>
> MPW installs itself as a foreign file system (it was pretty much the only

No... no MPW is not a Filesystem. It's a big directory, but there is no
filesystem. That's MachTen. MPW uses the Mac filesystem.

>
> I don't see much need for an attempt to do the job again.

Well, he wants to do it in Perl... he wants source... and he doesn't want
to install 20-80 MB of more stuff.


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