WELCOME TO MACPERL 5

This is Perl 5, ported to the Mac by Matthias Neeracher <neeri@iis.ee.ethz.ch>
Feel free to give this program away according to the terms stated 
in the README file.

System Requirements
-------------------

MacPerl5 requires System 7.

Online Help
-----------

MacPerl 5 comes with a considerable amount of HTML based online help. For this
help to work, make sure you have:

 - "MacPerl Help" and the "pod" folder in the same folder as your MacPerl
   application.
 - A recent version of Internet Config (preferably at least 1.2, which is
   bundled with your distribution).
 - Set up Internet Config with (Preferably identical) helpers for ÒhttpÓ
   and ÒfileÓ. 

Bugs, Suggestions, Damnations
-----------------------------

Please send your bug reports and/or fixes to <neeri@iis.ee.ethz.ch> 

Mailing list
------------

There is a mailing list for announcing new releases, sharing scripts, and 
discussions about how to make MacPerl change your life. To subscribe, send
the following mail:

----------------
To: mac-perl-request@iis.ee.ethz.ch

subscribe
----------------

Ftp sites
---------

If you have internet access, you can obtain the newest versions of Perl by 
anonymous ftp from one of the following address:

ftp.switch.ch [130.59.1.40]      	software/mac/perl

This site is mirrored at

ftp.share.com      pub/macperl
mors.gsfc.nasa.gov /pub/MacPerl/Applications

and in a huge number of CPAN (Common Perl Archive Network) mirror sites: 

North America

Florida 
    ftp://ftp.cis.ufl.edu/pub/perl/CPAN/ports/mac/
Illinois 
    ftp://uiarchive.cso.uiuc.edu/pub/lang/perl/CPAN/ports/mac/ 
Massachusetts 
    ftp://ftp.delphi.com/pub/mirrors/packages/perl/CPAN/ports/mac/ 
Oklahoma 
    ftp://ftp.uoknor.edu/mirrors/CPAN/ports/mac/  
Texas 
    ftp://ftp.sedl.org/pub/mirrors/CPAN/ports/mac/  
    ftp://ftp.sterling.com/programming/languages/perl/ports/mac/  

Europe

Finland 
    ftp://ftp.funet.fi/pub/languages/perl/CPAN/ports/mac/ 
France 
    ftp://ftp.ibp.fr/pub/perl/CPAN/ports/mac/  
    ftp://ftp.pasteur.fr/pub/computing/unix/perl/CPAN/ports/mac/  
Germany 
    ftp://ftp.leo.org/pub/comp/programming/languages/perl/CPAN/ports/mac/  
    ftp://ftp.rz.ruhr-uni-bochum.de/pub/programming/languages/perl/CPAN/ports/mac/  
Great Britain 
    ftp://ftp.demon.co.uk/pub/mirrors/perl/CPAN/ports/mac/  
The Netherlands 
    ftp://ftp.cs.ruu.nl/pub/PERL/CPAN/ports/mac/  
Portugal 
    ftp://ftp.ci.uminho.pt/pub/lang/perl/ports/mac/  
Sweden 
    ftp://ftp.sunet.se/pub/lang/perl/CPAN/ports/mac/  
Switzerland 
    ftp://ftp.switch.ch/mirror/CPAN/ports/mac/  

Australasia

Australia 
    ftp://coombs.anu.edu.au/pub/perl/ports/mac/  
    ftp://ftp.mame.mu.oz.au/pub/perl/CPAN/ports/mac/  
New Zealand 
    ftp://ftp.tekotago.ac.nz/pub/perl/CPAN/ports/mac/  

Asia

Japan 
    ftp://ftp.lab.kdd.co.jp/lang/perl/CPAN/ports/mac/  
Taiwan 
    ftp://dongpo.math.ncu.edu.tw/perl/CPAN/ports/mac/  

Africa

South Africa 
    ftp://ftp.is.co.za/programming/perl/CPAN/ports/mac/  


Matthias Neeracher					Office:	+41 1 445 24 08
Hohenklingenstrasse 19				Fax:		+41 1 445 24 24
8049 Zuerich							Home: 	+41 1 341 85 06
SWITZERLAND								Email:	<neeri@iis.ee.ethz.ch>

REVISION HISTORY

The person in [] is usually the key person to have convinced me to fix a 
bug or add a feature. Everyone mentioned in [] should be mentioned in the
MacPerl5 about box (Yes, your name could be there, too!).

5.1.3r2	21Jan97
 - Another attempt at runtime applications [Scott Weaver].

5.1.2r2	19Jan97
 - Choosing a file from one of the Apple Menu submenus under some 
 	versions of Apple Menu Options would crash [Kevin Cutts].
 - Opening a file would crash under obscure circumstances
 	[Angus McIntyre].
 - Socket.pm was broken in 5.1.1 [Paul Schinder].
 - Removed debugging print statements in timelocal code [Paul Schinder].
 - Added Speech Recognition support [Kenneth Albanowski].
 - Added "MacPerl Scripts" folder whose items get added to script
 	menu.
 - Fixed bug in GD [Ken Stuart].
 - Fixed support for deferred scripts, so MacPerl scripts can
 	now queue successor scripts.
 - Added "One Liner" script to simulate a command line. It even
 	does a bit of globbing [Devin Ben-Hur].
 - Bundled CGI glue [as suggested by Peter Lewis].
 
5.1.1r2	05Jan97
 - MacPerl would silently overwrite locked files [Robert Decker].
 - Saving runtime applications was broken.
 - Converting a droplet to a plain text file was broken.
 - Truncating the console din't work correctly [Alan Fry].
 - Linking with libmoto for some performance improvement [William Middleton].
 - Fixed numerous bugs in Mac::AppleEvents [Chris Nandor]. Rewrote
 	AEStreams interface OOP style.
 - Added documentation for Mac::Files [William Birkett].
 - Added some Alias Manager routines.
 - Changed color of small icons so they can highlight when something is
 	dropped on them [Lasse Petersen].
 - Added Macintsh specific (GUSI) consttants and packing to Sockets.
 - Added Text-To-Speech support.
 - Fine tuned cursor spinning.
 - Improved error pop-up.

5.1.0r2	21Oct96
 - Upgraded the Perl core to patchlevel 5.002_01. This should cause several bugs
   in the perl core to vanish.
 - Made MakeMaker work on the Mac with lots of help and moral support from
   Andreas Kšnig.
 - Many toolbox modules now included. Added a few examples in :ext:
 - Added "Shuck", a direct POD viewer, as a lightweight documentation
   alternative to WWW browsers. To use it, open Internet Config and 
	add "Shuck" as the helper for "pod".
 - Tried fixing unsigned long problems with time values [Stewart Holt].
 - Modified and unmodified scripts had different current directories for
	"Run Front Window" [Matthias Schmitt].
 - Stop hogging the preferences file, only open it when immediately 
   needed [Toni Harbaugh]
 - Fix MacPerl::Quit to work for fat runtimes. Also introduce symbolic¬
   constants [Tom Holub].
 - MacPerl::Ask() was broken when the user specified an empty string [Sam Choukri].
 - Command-. for the 68K MPW tool was broken for a long time 
   [Paul Patton, Chris Thorman].
 - Horizontal scroll bar thumb actions were accidentally misinterpreted as 
   vertical actions [Alan Fry].
 - Fixed various problems with BBEdit interaction [Brian Foy]
 - Fixed hardcoded chararacters in ftp.pl [Danny Thomas]
 - Work around integerizing problem affecting Time::Local [Diller Ryan]

5.0.7r1m 12Mar96
 - Printing \007 to the MacPerl console window now causes a beep 
   [Janis Greenberg].
 - The jump command did not work for droplets.
 - Runtimes were broken [lots of people, but I think it was Robert Coie who 
   first did the research on what was causing the crashes].
 - Some operations on bitvecs worked only the first time [reported by Paul Duda,
   fixed by John Peterson]
 - The MPW tool would crash on 68K machines [Guy Greenbaum]
   
5.0.6r1m 01Feb96
 - Redirecting STDIN would not work with <> [JŸrgen Christoffel].
 - After the first script execution, STDOUT would become unbuffered 
   [Jeff Johnson].
 - Perl would crash when running two CGI scripts in sequence (actually
   a bug in the CGI glue) [Steve Goodwin].
 - localtime, gmtime, and related routines and libraries exhibited various
   problems [Peter Creath, Brad Cox, Dave Wodelet].
 - Fixed a memory leak in sort [Vicki Brown].
 - Performance in the background and for CGIs should be significantly improved.
 - Performance for reads in raw mode massively improved [Dick Karpinski].
 - Added a new interaction mode "Duplex" and tried to improve the documentation
   of interaction modes in MacPerl.FrontEnd with actual AppleEvent logs.
 - Implemented crypt(), which now makes MacPerl officially a munition.
 - Cleaned up balloon help texts.
 - "Check Syntax" now works analogously with "Run Script", i.e., both on the front
   window and on a Standard file dialog [Angus McIntyre]
 - The operations working on the "front window" have subtly redefined that term
   to exclude console windows. This allows one to run a script again even if the
	output window is in front [Anybody wanna take credit for that suggestion?].
 - New environment variable "MACPERL" contains the path of the folder containing
   the MacPerl application.
 - Added a few automatic and semiautomatic ways to launch Internet Config. Among
   other places, you now find IC in the Preferences dialog, and MacPerl suggests
	that you launch IC if the file helper is missing.
 
5.0.5r1m 29Dec95
 - Fixed a disastrous bug with saving Droplets [Phil Ames]. The
   MPW Tool has not changed except for the version number.

5.0.4r1m 27Dec95
 - Input for CGI POST requests didn't work [Christian Huldt, I think].
 - Fixed various details in AppleEvent I/O streams, among them a very bad
   bug with remote control mode.
 - Removed edition manager support. I'm not sure if anyone was ever really
   using it, and apparently it caused problems on some machines. 
 - The long standing dependency on AppleScript should now a thing of the
   past [Too many people to thank].
 - Tried to improve sleep() behaviour [Paul Schinder].
 - STDERR was overly buffered [Brad Cox].
 - Copy & Paste had problems [Torsten Ekedahl].
 - Created macperl.{pod,html} from MacPerl.Specifics.
 - -w would give warnings about unused MacPerl::Version [Martin Heller].
 - Some versions of system were buggy [Charles Bailey].
 - Negative and big integers in MacPerl are very tricky. Fixed some bugs,
   would like to hear if there are any more [Steve Bollinger].
 - Verbose die()s would crash [Jon S. Stevens]
 
5.0.3r1m 26Nov95
 - When opening files, MacPerl 5.0.2r1m (and all earlier versions) calls
	PrValidate without calling PrOpen first. This causes horrible crashes
	when certain printers are selected, notably PDFWriter [Todd Hivnor].
 - I was locking the text handle of the front window "forever" as soon as 
   text was selected, which caused some operations to fail. This bug was
	also in MacPerl4, but never seems to have been found [Stonewall Ballard].
 - The MacPerl5 glue to choose() had a bug which caused PutFile to fail if a 
   default was specified [Espen S. Ore].
 - "-D" messages now go to the correct window, and you should no longer get
   bogus malloc diagnostics on startup of a script [Martin Heller].
 - Fixed an anachronism in perl5db.pl [Martin Heller].
 - Calling -v twice in a row would crash [Phil Ames].
 - Environment variables from the CGI glue would not be propagated correctly.
 - The XL callback glue had a bug which would lead to unpredictable
   results from XCMD calls [Jason Buberel].
 - A change introduced in 5.0.1 was causing input from the console to
   misbehave [Yuemo Zeng and Larry Allen-Tonar].

5.0.2r1m 05Nov95
 - Library paths got corrupted [Paul Schinder].
 - A bug in the help code led to crashes with System error 11 on startup 
 	[Charles Albrecht and Richard Moe]. 
 - After stopping a script with Command-., the next script would crash.
 - A few items omitted from the 5.0.1 notes:
 	- readlink() no longer mounts network volumes. This has the disadvantage
	  that you can't necessarily expect the result to be open()able, but is 
	  probably more useful for checking scripts [Martin Heller].
	- system now is implemented as print `xxx`, which is not quite correct
	  but covers the typical use of system().
	- umask is "implemented", but simply does nothing.
	- link is "implemented", but always fails.

5.0.1r1m	31Oct95
	I feel pretty good about this release:
	 -	Reliability should be considerably improved over 5.0.0
	 - The application features a new help system, based on suggestions by
	 	Martin Heller. You need to install Internet Config 1.2 and then 
		set up you favorite WWW browser as a helper entry for "file" for
		the whole thing to work.
	 - Thanks to persistent lobbying by Dick Karpinski, the application now
	   supports raw keyboard input. Check out :t:mac:Raw.t for an example.
	 - The script menu now has an entry for syntax checking the front window,
	   for turning on the debugger and for turning on compilation warnings.
		I believe that the new debugger interface will make it easier to debug
		droplets and such.
	 - The a2p tool has been included and sort of works. 
	 - A source code release should appear within a week.
	 
5.0.0		25Aug95
	This release is too good to delay and too bad to release. It had to go out
	today as I'm leaving for holidays. In general, it seems to behave sensibly,
	except for the application in out of memory situations. Don't run out of
	memory. The library is mostly untested. 
		Extra points for identifying all sounds in the about box and for finding 
	the one feature that is missing in MacPerl4, although it could theoretically 
	have been implemented there.