Re: Perl on a Macintosh

A mac running Darwin/OSX is as capable for development as any Linux box. In fact, some would argue, even more capable.

Keep in mind a few things:

The default filesystem is case-insensitive. Yeah, unlike all boxes in the Unix world. So, there's a few CPAN modules that blow up for that. You can either avoid those, or make a UFS filesystem to mount as needed.
Nearly any interesting "unix" tool is available either in Fink or DarwinPorts. However, neither of them cover the entire list of interesting things, and installing stuff from both will be troublesome and redundant. And for other things, you'll have to install things yourself anyway (like I build a daily updated version of Emacs from CVS, so that I can get a nice Carbon Emacs that acts Mac-like).
Yes, there is a Perl community at Apple, and Perl is fully supported on the Mac.
You can write XCode programs with a natural Mac GUI, using Perl code to implement the triggers, using Camelbones. By You, I mean someone smarter than me, because I still haven't gotten my head completely around it.

Comment on Re: Perl on a Macintosh

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Re^2: Perl on a Macintosh by dsheroh (Monsignor) on May 11, 2006 at 23:03 UTC
The default filesystem is case-insensitive. Yeah, unlike all boxes in the Unix world. It's actually slightly worse than that... I don't recall the circumstances in which it's bitten me, but OSX's default filesystem is sometimes case-sensitive and sometimes (most of the time) not. I have no idea what the guys at Apple were thinking when they allowed that to happen. That single issue aside, though, I'm currently on my second PowerBook and have found it to be a wonderful platform, both for Perl development and for doing unixy things in general.	[reply]
Re^2: Perl on a Macintosh by bart (Canon) on May 12, 2006 at 08:01 UTC
The default filesystem is case-insensitive. Yeah, unlike all boxes in the Unix world. So, there's a few CPAN modules that blow up for that. Can you elaborate, and finger a few of those suckers? Windows is case insensitive too, so the same modules will blow up on Windows too. That may or may not matter, depending on how Unix-centric those modules are. Together with Mac-OSX, that makes a large part of the Perl community. I think that is not acceptable, but maybe that's just me... I think depending on the case of a file name to distinguish between two files, is a bad practice. Especially for Perl modules. Again, maybe that's just me...	[reply]