Re: [MacPerl] Porting an Inside Mac QuickDraw example routine

[Chris Nandor <pudge@pobox.com>]

At 21.53 -0500 1999.11.10, ilir topalli wrote:
>Is what your saying that the toolbox modules are implemented as similarly
>to the
>Inside Mac Specifications as possible and that still jives with the way people
>do things in perl?

Kinda.  When possible, they have the same names, take the same arguments
when reasonable, etc.  But it is not Pascal or C, it is Perl.  So there are
no structs, there are objects with accessor methods.  There are no real
constants in Perl, there are inlined subroutines.  So basically, I believe
the answer is yes.


>If so The toolbox routines were created by Apple which did not have any
>consideration of Perl in mind when they designed
>This is why so many people stick to standard Perl and avoid using them.  (That
>and the fact that documentation is sparse, and that apart from being a list of
>terms the shuck information is not terribly useful).

I don't understand this.  They are just functions.  It is not relevant if
they were designed for Perl or not.  They're just functions.  If people
avoid them, it has nothing to do with the fact that they were "designed"
for C or Pascal, but because it just takes a lot to use them, which could
be the case if it were originally designed for Perl.


>After making a time investment in learning Perl, many would prefer not to have
>to make a much larger committment to learning a huge text such as  Inside
>Macintosh.  Although it would be great if everyone did, I think it creates a
>barrier to entry into these functions.

If you want to use the Mac OS Toolbox functions, you need to learn them
through Inside Macintosh.  That is the inescapable barrier to entry.  Now,
a higher level interface to some of this can be created, but if a
programmer is going to use these functions, he needs to know these
functions.


>Hopefully there will be an alternative that won't require users to be
>responsible for so much

Well, it won't create itself out of thin air.  I won't do it, and I doubt
Matthias will.  There are others who could do it, but it is a singificant
task.

Having the MacPerl Toolbox modules as they are is, to my mind, essential
and exactly how it should be.  We must have the low-level functions to
create, later, high-level ones.  Maybe when you learn Perl well, you can
take a shot at it, if no one else does.  It is certainly a worthy project.

-- 
Chris Nandor          mailto:pudge@pobox.com         http://pudge.net/
%PGPKey = ('B76E72AD', [1024, '0824090B CE73CA10  1FF77F13 8180B6B6'])

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