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From: lsr@Apple.COM (Larry Rosenstein)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.mac
Subject: Re: Real Multifinder (was Re: Hey Apple Mac engineers...)
Message-ID: <4010@internal.Apple.COM>
Date: 1 Sep 89 17:37:18 GMT
Sender: usenet@Apple.COM
Distribution: usa
Organization: Objects-R-Us,  Apple Computer, Inc.
Lines: 36
References:<46100321@uxe.cso.uiuc.edu> <1989Aug15.001507.14552@sj.ate.slb.com> <24626@iuvax.cs.indiana.edu> <3997@internal.Apple.COM> <738@eplrx7.UUCP>

In article <738@eplrx7.UUCP> leipold@eplrx7.UUCP (leipold) writes:
> I've been watching this thread for a week or so, and have to disagree
> (partially) with the above.  The original question appeared to refer to
> the amount of extra code you'd need to add to a Unix-style program
> (which gets backgrounding for free) to get it running in the background

As I said in my message, you have you have to do more work to write a 
program that does a computation in the background under MultiFinder.  For 
the typical Macintosh application, however, the work necessary to get it 
to run smoothly under MultiFinder is small.

If you are talking about a UNIX-style tool (eg, grep), then you need to 
provide a mechanism for handling the command line arguments to the tool.  
In the normal Macintosh environment, this means writing code to collect 
the parameters in a dialog box.  You will have to write some extra code to 
run in the background (including and event loop), but it won't destroy the 
structure of the tool.

It is pretty trivial to get a UNIX tool to run under MPW.  (I suspect this 
also applies to development environments besides MPW.)  You don't need an 
event loop at all.  To run in the background, all you need to do is yield 
the CPU periodially; MPW will take care of the rest.

> _lot_ of good Unix programs.  I'd like to be able to use them "out of
> the box" on my Mac.  And some tasks (that I'd probably like to run in
> the background anyway) are more efficiently handled with the Unix 'user
> interface standard' of filters and pipes, especially when enhanced by
> shell scripts and filename wildcards.

MPW is the ideal environment for this kind of work.

Larry Rosenstein, Apple Computer, Inc.
Object Specialist

Internet: lsr@Apple.com   UUCP: {nsc, sun}!apple!lsr
AppleLink: Rosenstein1