Re: [MacPerl] MacPerl and OS X (yet again :-)

[Chris Nandor <pudge@pobox.com>]

At 7:04 -0500 2000.09.22, David Steffen wrote:
>1) What is the newline character under OS X?

Same as regular Unix, LF (\012, \x0A).

While under Mac OS, I copied text files from my Mac OS startup disk to my
Mac OS X disk, drag and drop.  Then I needed to run `perl -pi.bak -e
's/\015/\012/g' *.PL` to fix them.  I don't know of a "solution" to this
problem.  It might be nice to have a special drag modifier key that would
convert text files appropriately (as well as a special argument to cp).

Also note: perl 5.6 comes with Mac OS X Beta, but there is no perldoc,
pod2man, etc.  Of course, there are no compilers or other build tools,
either (yet; I understand they will be made available).


>2) I deleted a rambling discourse on this; so to say it briefly,
>anyone who has run Perl under Windows knows why MacPerl is so
>wonderful.  Developing short little scripts in the simple integrated
>MacPerl enviroment is quick, easy, and intuitive.  Droplets fit
>nicely into both the Perl and Macintosh paradigms.  Unless MacOS X
>eliminates drag and drop, point and click as the primary interface, I
>see just as much a need for the MacPerl application under OS X as
>under OS 1-9 (sez he who still has a copy of OS 1).  It seems to me
>this is entirely separate from the whole issue of porting the
>interpreter per se; the application consists of the basic interpreter
>plus a simple, intuitive development environment plus the droplet
>code.  OS X may change how best to port the interpreter, but it seems
>to me that the development environment and the droplet code are as
>useful as ever.  Am I missing something?

Well, I see little or no need for the MacPerl application.  As for
droplets, well, they would be pretty simple to create in Mac OS X.  Now,
here is the bad news: I made a perl script executable (chmod a+x), but it
appears as a text file.  This is Bad.  However, I imagine it would be
mostly trivial to create an executable wrapper for the script, just like
the current droplet code, which would send the script and the dropped
contents to /usr/bin/perl instead of MacPerl.


>3) Is it anticipated that all web serving and CGI programming will be
>done in an essentially Unix environment?  Will the need for "save as
>CGI script" have past?

I imagine so.


>4) Will the AppleEvents interapplication interface be entirely
>replaced by a Unix stdin/stdout interface?

No.  Take Internet Explorer, for example.  It is a Carbon or Cocoa app
(which is it, and how does one tell?  I dunno), yet it has no STDIN/STDOUT.
I should be able to talk to it with Apple events (though I haven't yet
tried, or figured out how :-).

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

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