I've been developing natural language processing technology in Perl in a
Unix environment for about a year and a half. I've always used Mac at home
and was overjoyed when OS X came out. I do a large part of my Perl work in
OS X now, at home, and I really love it. Since the programs I write
basically process text I find the OS X environment poses few problems for
me and has many advantages, some of which large governmental agencies like
NASA have pointed out: 1) the G4 chip is extremely fast, with the best
speed to price ratio out there, the programs I write are very processor
intensive. The Sun systems at work are slow because they're old and no one
can afford to pay the outrageous $$ required to make them faster. 2) there
are already quite a few nice text editors for OS X (like Pepper) that you
can't get on Unix (I like syntax coloring, etc.) and things just run much
more quickly and smoothly, 3) the Perl of OS X is much more compatible with
the Perl on Solaris than it is with the other alternative at work (the
Windows version of Perl) just because OS X and Unix are very different from
DOS in terms of (command-line style) system interaction.
One thing I really miss is perlTK module, which I don't believe exists for
the Mac OS under any form. In fact, I was wondering if anyone has had
success installing modules using CPAN? I get the same CPAN error when I
try to install something, that perl.h could not be found and that I should
reinstall Perl. Any ideas on how to remedy this (or is it just tough
luck). Thanks for any info.
-Aaron
At 12:40 PM 4/20/01 +0000, Justin Simoni wrote:
>Since this is somewhat a new list, I am very curious of hearing what people
>are using Perl on MacOSX for. It seems that people who are serious about
>coding would opt for a linux or FreeBsd alternative, since this is most
>likely what these program will be run under when they're released. I could
>be wrong here, and be substaintualy undermining the number of developers for
>MacOSX and OSX Server, but right now, the client version of the OS isn't a
>hot rod for Webserver and much of the polish really just gets in the way of
>someone who knows what they're doing.
>
>I myself use OSX as another test bed for an Open Source Project of mine.
>Since my cable modem wigs out every few days, I can still develop without
>having to connect to a server to upload my goodies. The default apache
>config for OSX is somewhat weird. I bought a mac in the first place because
>I am also a graphic designer and go to school for a fine arts degree. It's
>quite a frightening thing to see a terminal up right besides photoshop, and
>now with the help of Xtools, see the Gimp try to jockey for position with
>PS. Its funny, I still use MacPerl within BBEdit, to do a quick syntac
>check, in the future I hope to be using the Perl that comes with OSX, since
>macperl is based on like 5.002, and certain regexs don't quite, well, work.
>
>I'm hoping some of the ideas used with Macperl don't die off, things like
>Droplets and Filters (for BBEdit at least) I'm still primarilly using the
>GUI for everything and these were some great tools to use.
>
>Justin Simoni
>http://skazat.com
>
Aaron Lawson, Ph.D
Linguistic Researcher
MNIS-TextWise Labs, LLC
(315)426-9311, ext. 260
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
