[comp.sys.mac] Writing Desk Accessories in C

spector@brillig.umd.edu (Lee Spector) (01/13/89)

Does anybody know of a painless way to make a C program run as a
Desk Accessory on a macintosh?  I have a program (a calculator-like
expression evaluator) that reads strings from standard in, processes 
them, and writes to standard out.  I'd like to install it on a mac 
so that the user could select the DA from the apple menu, causing 
a scrolling (if possible) text window (with a close box) to 
appear that would act like a normal terminal screen.  The only
fancy interface element I require is that the user should be able
use the mouse and the editing commands to modify the text the text
in the DA window. (I want the user to be able to grab parts of
previous expressions, pressing RETURN to send the string to the program.)
I have asked this question previously in regard to Pascal programs; 
the general response was "you have to do alot of mac system programming."
Is the situation with C any better?  I don't know the mac's guts and I'm
not learning any time soon.

Thanks a bunch,   - Lee (spector@brillig.umd.edu)