Greetings,
I'm porting perl to a platform called Genie, which is a Unix-like
subsystem that runs in Mac OS. The purpose of this exercise is to have
a command-line perl tool available for Mac OS, in a stdio environment
with polymorphic file descriptors, without the limitations of MPW.
(E.g. MPW tools cannot call other programs; only MPW Shell scripts can
do this. Genie could be used to run CGI scripts from a Web server.)
Also, I understand that perl 5 is a build requirement for parrot.
Another goal of this project is to support parrot development on Mac
OS.
In most ways, Genie-ish perl will resemble unix perl more than MacPerl
-- e.g. open() takes Unix pathnames, and in general everything works
like a unix, even if it isn't. The only thing that's absolutely out of
the question is fork(), since Mac OS has a universal flat address
space, and well-behaved apps like Genie don't muck about in the address
translation tables. But with the right misbehavior even that's a
possibility, though one for another time. In the meantime, Genie
provides something vaguely resembling vfork().
Tonight I produced a minimally functioning miniperl. I owe many thanks
to Matthias Neeracher and Chris Nandor for their efforts on MacPerl,
and especially Matthias for GUSI, from which I've heavily borrowed for
Genie.
Genie is actually part of a project I unfortunately named LAMP (LAMP
Ain't Mac POSIX) before I was aware of the more common expansion. I've
since renamed it 'Lamp' in the hope that that will stem at least a
little confusion.
Josh
--
Joshua Juran
Metamage Software Creations - Mac Software and Consulting
http://www.metamage.com/
* Creation at the highest state of the art *
