[MACTCL] Re: tcl_platofrm & MacOSX

[Daniel A. S. <st...@ic...>]

At 10:14 -0700 on 14/9/01, Jim Ingham wrote:

>I don't really think it much matters, but I am inclined to putting 
>all the stuff into one package, but just building it differently on 
>the two platforms.  In the long run, Classic MacOS will fade away, 
>and so I would rather not introduce a distinction that won't really 
>be meaningful three years from now.

true enough, given the great improvements in 10.1 I'm certainly 
hopeful for a larger user move to X and a sharp decline in support 
requests for classic mactcl... however, tcl/tk being used a lot in 
academia, and unis generally having lots of old macs standing around, 
classic tcl/tk could be around for a while.

>
>Great!  Do you think it would be a good idea to pull all this stuff 
>out of the Tcl distro, and move it into a separate source base?  I 
>am a little inclined to do this, since then we could add stuff to it 
>a little more freely, since it would not be linked to the overall 
>Tcl versions.

yes, very good idea, maybe still part of the SF Tcl project but in a 
separate tree, like the thread package?

>  There is a bunch more Mac stuff we could add, like TclAE, that 
>would be really useful, and it might be convenient to have just one 
>big package require you could do to get a whole bunch of MacOS 
>goodies...

yes indeed, if things like TIP59 ever want to be able to control mac 
apps from tcl it would really be helpful if we could count on the 
presence of TclAE. I assume Tclapplescript would go in there as well?

>Yes - that seems the most friendly way to do it.  But we will also 
>have to automatically do the package require for people on Classic 
>Mac OS, since they didn't have to do it up to now, and it would be 
>better not to break existing programs & scripts.

yes obviously, well that shouldn't be too hard using an appropriate tclIndex

[packge require Tclapplescript] could then also just 'package 
require' the new package, same for TclAE etc.

I envisage OSX to really become a killer Tcl platform if we have Tcl 
with TkAqua and built in AE support; it'll be the perfect glue 
between cli unix apps, carbon/classic apps and custom Tk GUI.
AE's on OSX are just so cool, I'm currently using the Classic version 
of the Mathematica Kernel from a perl cgi via AE to output tex source 
which is then compiled by pdflatex and served via apache to a browser 
pdf plugin, yay!

Cheers,

Daniel

-- 
** Daniel A. Steffen          **  "And now to something completely
** Department of Mathematics  **   different"    Monty Python
** Macquarie University       ** <mailto:st...@ma...>
** NSW 2109 Australia         ** <http://www.maths.mq.edu.au/~steffen/>