Bruce Van Allen wrote:
> Chris -- Some hosts, upon asking if anyone wants coffee, will take
> literally the answer "only if you're going to make it anyway"; others
> will interpret it as "please make some."
>
> I do still use a 68K Mac. Besides its function as a floppy disk drive
> for my newer PowerMac (!), my SE-30 serves faithfully as a data
> sidecar. My work brings me data files of many types and conditions,
> so receiving a file means first doing some amount of rearranging,
> cleaning, parsing, sorting, extracting, compacting, you name it,
> quarantined all the while in some cases.
>
> For this purpose I keep a very stable setup in that little Mac box,
> with MacPerl 520r4, Excel 4.0. Word 5.1, and BBEdit as my principal
> tools. MacPerl is usually the first and often the only tool I use on
> a given task, and I now have a small library of Perl routines
> installed that make this machine a valuable member of my LAN. And it
> would be great to have the new capabilities of 5.6.1 in there.
I think Bruce makes a good point. MacPerl can make an old Mac a very useful
tool. Still, the currently availible version is very usefull. Also an issue to
the future of MacPerl is whether it will make sense for a user of OS X to use
MacPerl instead of running Perl on the UNIX underpinnings of the system. If
development of MacPerl is for just for users of systems 8 & 9, is this becoming
too focused?
I'm just an amature programer who became interested in MacPerl when I took a
class in CGI programing with Perl. I've tried to use AppleScript to write a few
scripts in the past and became frustrated with the lack of good documentation.
(Perhaps using MacPerl w/ AppleScript will still apeal to OS X users.) After
discovering MacPerl, I felt I finally had a language I could use. Thanks for
all the good work.
