Last week (Friday), I took on a challenge: Embed perl in a text editor. This started as the usual lunchtime BS session, centered around interesting things to do (with the usual chest-pounding through in gratis) and I vaguely remember saying 'Ya---know, it would be interesting to see what it would take to add perl to a text editor as its script language...' Net result, heavy suggestions all around that I go do this SMOP (small matter of programming) and report back. Implied belief of imminent failure aside, I took this on over the weekend. Here is a run-down:

• Begin web-research.
• Found CPerlWrap by Harold Bamford.
• Determined stdout/stderr was going to be a problem and asked PM (255056) for a clue.
• Got clue! Podmaster pointed to PerlIO_stdout(). As it turns out, PerlIO_stdout() is all you need for a freopen('stdout.txt','w+',PerlIO_stdout); which is pretty much the solution.
• Build Q&D text editor using VC++ app wizard.
• Stir in CPerlWrap.
• Preserve STDOUT and STDERR with trick from above.
• Bake in warm box at 2ghz for approximately half the time a real app would take.
• And presto! A toy embedded perl app called 'PerlEdit'!! Given source code in one window, click on the run button---results appear in window labeled 'stdout'. Errors if any, to window labeled 'stderr'.

Actually, while certainly not serious, it has been interesting. I'm still daydreaming about implications and possibilities inherent in such a thing. IDE comes to mind. Editor, with worlds most powerful macro language, comes to mind. Numerous other half and quarter baked ideas come to mind---and etc. In fact the hard thing to do is to not come up with ideas! For instance, what if the editor was visual and understood chess boards?

--hsm

"Never try to teach a pig to sing...it wastes your time and it annoys the pig."

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