Re: [MacPerl] MacPerl plan for OSX

[Chris Nandor <pudge@pobox.com>]

At 23:16 -0400 2000.09.20, Richard Michaud wrote:
>Anyhow, I ramble...The main reason for this email from the world of OS X, is
>that I noticed that OS X has a BSD port of Perl 5.006 preinstalled.
>Whether this will be in the final consumer version, I'm not sure, but...it
>does raise a question I have (if it hasn't been already).  What is to become
>of MacPerl?

We should have a FAQ online somewhere for this.

MacPerl will continue to exist, and is still being developed.  Matthias is
working on the MacPerl port of 5.6.  There have been successful builds of
many of the components of it, including the MPW tool and some of the
modules, and Matthias started work on the MacPerl application portion.  It
is now built from the actual perl source and Matthias is making it possible
to build with Apple's free compilers in addition to the payware CodeWarrior
compilers, so in the future, to make MacPerl work, you just download the
free stuff from Apple, the perl source from CPAN, and the few Mac-specific
components from Matthias, and build it.

On Mac OS X, there is not much use for MacPerl, except to script the
Classic environment.  However, there could be significant use for the
MacPerl toolbox modules, and those could be ported to Carbon / Mac OS X.
That is a much easier task than building MacPerl, and the source is all
there, so almost anyone could work on it.  However, before it is done,
interface issues should be worked out so the proper framework is in place
for moving forward.

That covers only the Carbon API; some people will doubtless want to cover
the Cocoa (Rhapsody/Yellow Box/etc.) API.  TipTop already has a product for
this (http://www.tiptop.com/), but I don't know if it is still being
supported (there hasn't been a release in awhile, with no mention of DR4 or
the public beta on the page).  But we could in theory write our own without
too much work, since both Perl and Objective C are dynamic.  That would be
really cool.

-- 
Chris Nandor                      pudge@pobox.com    http://pudge.net/
Open Source Development Network    pudge@osdn.com     http://osdn.com/

# ===== Want to unsubscribe from this list?
# ===== Send mail with body "unsubscribe" to macperl-request@macperl.org