nagle@well.sf.ca.us (John Nagle) (05/17/91)
The latest MPW, 3.2, is supposed to work under A/UX. But there are
problems. One fundamental problem is MPW's misfeature of looking for
regular expressions delimited by slashes in all MPW shell input.
This causes real trouble when running off an A/UX file system, because there
isn't any obvious way to express a full UNIX pathname without using a "/".
You can use the Mac's ":" syntax within pathnames, but there's just no way
to say "root" with the ":" notation. (See Inside Macintosh, vol. 4).
MPW has all sorts of escaping features for literal characters, as
befits an ill-designed macroprocessor. Unfortunately, the same problem
that breaks other languages with escaping and macros hits MPW; after
a macroexpansion, the escaping characters disappear. When running
a script like the MPW startup script, pathnames get put through
multiple levels of substitution, and quoted filenames become unquoted,
and thus invalid MPW syntax if they contain a slash. Even putting
in multiple escape charactes doesn't work, because different parts
of the startup script run the strings through different numbers of
macroexpansions. So even the old multiple backslash trick from nroff
macros (another example of a miserable macrolanguage) doesn't work.
Apple support is supposed to get back to me on this. Any ideas
on a workaround?
John Nagle