> Please don't kill me for this question, but as I have been > using MacPerl > for a couple of years now just to develop CGIs that > eventually run on a > linux box, I started to wonder what you guys really use MacPerl for. I > mean, MacPerl is more than Perl, otherwise this list wouldn't > exist. What > kind of apps do you make with it? >
As many others have noted, this is an excellent question. Folks have already preached the wonderful value of the toolbox modules, so let me give you my take on things... The best part about MacPerl is that it is Perl. Many of the good things about Perl apply (CPAN, etc.) but in the end it is the cross platform nature of Perl that makes it a win for us. My team uses Perl for dozens of (internal-only) utilities ranging from CVS frontends and resource fork merge utilties to a complete build system. As the team lead and the only Mac guy on the team, it is a big help to know that when a new utility is written for my customers (internal developers) by one of my Win32 or UNIX folks, that utility will come across to MacPerl with minimal effort. Certainly this sort of cross-platform work can be done with C or another language, but my experience is that good cross-platform work is hard, and requires teams knowledgeable in all platforms or a solid set of base cross-platform libraries to start with. Thanks to Chris, Matthias, and others hard work MacPerl comes with that base set of libraries. As a result I can usually count on the fact that file manipulation utilities (which Perl excels at) will run everywhere I need them (Mac, Win, Linux, Solaris). Certainly there are platform specific part to the code (the Mac, Win32 and Tk GUIs for example, along with resource handling on the various platforms) but out of thousands lines of code remarkably little is platform specific (at least compared to other Mac/Win32 cross-platform projects I've worked on). So in a sense, I think that while "MacPerl is more than Perl" in your Mac to Linux work you've already found one of the best reasons to use it. Alex -- Alex Harper [EMAIL PROTECTED] Configuration Manager [EMAIL PROTECTED] "Use whatever you think of first" -- Larry Wall
