Re: Beginning Problems

[mhearse]

If you are writing perl scripts on Mac OS X, I recommend the following:

1. Go to Applications => Utilities => Terminal
2. Adjust the window and text size to your liking
3. Use nano to edit your files: nano hello.pl
4. After saving your changes, check the syntax: shell> perl -c ./hello.pl
5. Feed your script to the perl interpreter (it is hungry): perl ./hello.pl

[Jenda]

I hope this was meant as a joke!

I mean, there's nothing wrong with nano if all you have is a terminal connection somewhere, but suggesting this to someone who's apparently new to programming and (to some extent) computers in general? Someone, I bet, used to GUIs?

[mhearse]

I take your point. Maybe this was a poor suggestion. I tend to see things through my own eyes when I began(1996 using the FreeBSD easy editor). But that doesn't mean everyone else has to suffer.

[mhearse]

Oh, and I agree of course about vi. But when teaching people, I find that they get discouraged.

[Anonymous Monk]

Most of the GUI text editors make it difficult to save in a plain-ascii plain-text format. They tend to use fancy file formats, save as UTF-16, insert byte-order-marks, or have odd newlines. Dropping down to a terminal-based text editor may be easier than teaching someone how to find the options to turn each of these off in a program you haven't used previously.

(And anyway, nano sucks. vim is better. And probably easier to learn, too.)

[Jenda]

Beg your pardon? Nobody would suggest using MS Word or anything similar (though we've had a post by someone who used something like that and saved the script in RTF format). I just tested this with Perl 5.8.9 (rather dated, don't you think) and it doesn't care whether the script is 8bit, utf8 with or without BOM, utf16LE or utf16BE. All work fine.

[Anonymous Monk]

(And anyway, nano sucks. vim is better. And probably easier to learn, too.)

HA!