Re: Conversational programming in Perl for EMC

Thanks Fred and Matt for the fast action on this. I will admit that I
know a lot more about Perl than tcl, so Im biased to think I can do a
better job with Perl.

I Perl for Windows is just as readily available as Tcl/Tk. The
www.perl.org site has lots of pointers, and there is considerable perl
on Win activity. There are some differenecs, but they seem to mostly
have to do with unix like stuff, like getting file permissions, and
such.

Note, that if we use perl, or whatever we use, EMC wont be part of the
picture on Win or Mac systems. The only way to support a CPNC on them
would be to use one of the serial line devices like FlashCut or Simple
Step, or a driver like INDEXER.LPT. Then all the perl code has to do is
read/write to a serial port.

Even under unix we will only need a small subset of the emc functions in
perl. I expect CPNC to have very few calls to its driver level- not much
more than move((X,Y,Z) or feed(X,Y,Z) or get(X,Y,Z), maybe an abort and
init. It would be nice of course to have the entire range of emc
function available to perl, but to do CPNC I dont expect to need them.

I have been slowed on writing the CPNC product requirements doc as I
studied a bit of tcl, but I am still on it.

ron