Well. I've worked through the 900+ messages here, worked through Bert
Altenberg's dark velvet tutorials (eventually finding out the hidden control
bar at the top of the screen), found illuminating gems in the downloadable
version of "Power and Ease", wrestled with the mysteries of POD and web
versions of the manual, and run a few tiny programmes.
In the past, for my personal use on my university's unix systems I always
used to stick to shell scripts and awk, and wrote processing scripts for
culling what I wanted in them from news and mail groups. When PC's came in
I majored on the dos batch language and awk. For tricky things on unix I
could call on our resident experts who would construct a mysteriously
compact and beautiful few lines of Perl that I had no hope of reading, let
alone creating for myself, even though the kindly expert would tell me every
so often that I really ought to learn Perl.
Now I'm retired and trying to master the previously unknown world of Mac OS
in general, and version 9.0.4 in particular, and coming to the view that I
shall need to use both MacPerl and AppleScript. It's a slow business,
partly since 9.0.4 seems to be something of an unfinished backwater between
8.6 and 10, and partly because I have the sort of mind that languishes if it
doesn't get occasional new bird's eye perspectives within which I can hold
the mix of bits and pieces.
So I am greatly enjoying Chapters 2 and 3 (on Perl) of
David Barron, The World of Scripting Languages, Wiley, 2000
and its appendix note on books and resources. So much so that I wanted to
tell you about it. (It also bestrides TCL, Visual Basic, JavaScript, and
the Microsoft Scripting Model, but that's for another day)
One remark leapt off the page. After reporting the wide range of platforms a
Perl script will run on, provided you don't use anything that is special to
a particular operating system, he wrote
Initially, the UNIX version was ported to each of the other platforms
but as from Perl 5.005 all implementations are derived from a common
source file
It made me wonder whether the current MacPerl implementation of 5.006 is
being helped by that, or whether the benefit will mostly be limited to perl
with OS10.
--
Hylton
