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From: erkyrath@netcom.com (Andrew Plotkin)
Subject: Re: Inform on the Mac
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Date: Tue, 19 Nov 1996 04:12:31 GMT
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Greg Ewing (greg@cosc.canterbury.ac.nz) wrote:
> Everyone seems to be overlooking a third and much better
> alternative: AppleScript.

> In my opinion, the best way to achieve a minimal-effort
> Mac port of a command-driven program is to make
> it completely AppleEvent-driven. 

Cool! Write it. :-)

> Although this is not an entirely trivial thing to do
> (it can be a bit daunting dealing with the Apple Event
> Manager the first time around), it's going to be a heck
> of a lot easier than building a decent GUI, and the
> result is going to be a heck of a lot more useful than
> a kludgy pseudo-command-line dialog box.

Well, Robert Pelak's Mac Inform isn't that bad. Inform's action can be
stated nicely as "set a bunch of preferences, pick a source file, and
compile it." So it's not a pseudo-command-line dialog box; it's a bunch of
preferences dialogs, which you look at once, and a "Go" command which
brings up a standard file picker. 

(In that sense, it's the command line interface which is kludgy, because 
you have to list the preferences every single time you run it. :-) But 
that's the convention for CLI compilers, and I certainly don't want to 
see it changed in Unix Inform.)

--Z



-- 

"And Aholibamah bare Jeush, and Jaalam, and Korah: these were the
borogoves..."
