In article <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>, [EMAIL PROTECTED] (Chip Howland) wrote:
> At 10:29 AM -0700 7/11/03, Chris Nandor wrote: > > >> and here's a Perl tutorial: > >[snip way too many lines of tutorial, apparently intended to make perl look > >a lot harder than it is] > > > >Here is what, perhaps, you meant: > > > >Open BBEdit > >Type > > print "Hello, world." > >Run the script > > > > Yes, that's one way to run a Perl script, but Apple doesn't bundle > BBEdit with OS X. I wasn't trying to make Perl look harder than it > is. I was illustrating the baseline of knowledge you need to get > started. Oh, come now. Even if you wanted to do the "bundled with Mac OS X" thing, it could have been as simple as: Open Terminal Type perl -e 'print "Hello, world.\n"' Hit enter You did not go through how to save scripts in Script Editor, which was part of what you did for the Perl example. You did not discuss differences between compiled scripts, applications, and source text. etc. > I think you might be a special case. Not everyone has written > Mac::Glue or maintained MacPerl. If you are claiming that you can do > everything with Perl and Mac::Glue that you can with Applescript, > then I won't dispute you. But don't pretend it's just as easy for a > novice. As long as you don't pretend that AppleScript is easy for a novice, I won't pretend that Perl is. I am an expert of sorts, and I find AppleScript very difficult to use. YMMV, of course. I do concede -- for the record! -- that AppleScript is easier to figure out than Mac::Glue, for finding out what works and what doesn't. I even use Script Editor when I am figuring out what to use in Mac::Glue, sometimes, if I get stuck. But AppleScript is MUCH more difficult -- for me -- in pretty much *everything else*. And since once I know how to do something controlling an app in AppleScript, it is pretty simple to convert to Mac::Glue (while the opposite is not true: knowing how to do something handling data or flow control etc. in Perl provides no instruction for AppleScript), it makes a lot of sense to use Mac::Glue, if you know Perl. Yes, there is a learning curve, but what gets me is when people assert that AppleScript is easy for some reason. I just don't see it. And if you already know AppleScript well, the learning curve for Mac::Glue is tiny (mostly a matter of modifying syntax). OK, I admit, I've gone off on a tangent from the original "yes Perl can do that" onto "Mac::Glue r00lZ!," but I just released it for Mac OS X recently and I haven't talked about it much on this list since then. :-) > I wish I had cross-posted my original reply to MACSCPT so we could > have a proper flamewar. Oh yeah, that's a GREAT idea. ;-) -- Chris Nandor [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://pudge.net/ Open Source Development Network [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://osdn.com/
