Perl/Tk for Windows

> From: Ron Ginger <ginger@...>
> 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.

I thought I'd try to get Perl/Tk going on my Win95 machine and run a simple
"Hello World" script just to see what was involved. I searched around a bit
and found this page:

http://www.Lehigh.EDU/~sol0/ptk/

which pointed me to:

http://www.activestate.com/

Apparently this is a popular binary Perl distribution for Windows, but before
I downloaded it I looked at the installation information page for Windows:

http://www.activestate.com/ActivePerl/docs/faq/Windows/Install.html

which said that I'd need to update a few things on my Win95 machine which
were no big deal except I also had to install IE5 and I'm not going to do
that, uh uh, nope, no way...

I searched around some more and found this page:

http://www.cpan.org/ports/index.html#win32

where they highly recommend building Perl from its source. As I don't have
Visual C++, I need a precompiled binary distribution. In this category they
recommend the aforementioned ActiveState version and:

http://people.netscape.com/kristian/nsPerl/

This looked like just what I needed, so I got this file:

http://people.netscape.com/kristian/nsPerl/nsPerl5.004_05-12-MSWin32-x86.zip

and installed it without a hitch! Great! Now I needed the Tk part of Perl/Tk
so I got this file:

http://www.perl.com/CPAN-local/modules/by-module/Tk/Tk800.021.tar.gz

unpacked it, ran the Perl script that makes the Makefile, and then I needed
Visual C++ to compile it...

I couldn't find a precompiled Tk module for Perl, so I'm stuck. If Perl is a
"must have" I think the most rational thing to do would be to get Visual C++
(or something else that will work) and compile Perl and the Tk module from
their source. Once we have that we can figure out how to pack it up for
distribution with the CPNC program.

Some other options:

1. I'd seriously look into this:

| From: paul@... (and echoed by psp@...)
| Have you looked into [incr Tcl]? It adds an object view to the essentially
| flat Tcl variable space and it's supported as a standard extension
| by Scriptics.
|
| See http://www.tcltk.com/itcl/ for an overview.

2. I might look into this, or at least try to install it on Win95:

| From: Phil Wilshire <philw@...>
| Perl is good.
| but ..
| Python is My favorite.

> 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.

I'm also hoping to be able to use CPNC for lightweight offline programming on
Win95 by just saving the G-code files to disk. That's why I'm concerned about
the difficulty of Perl/Tk installation for Windows. It's worthwhile to note
that Tcl/Tk installation on my Win95 machine consists of getting this file:

http://dev.scriptics.com/download/tcl/tcl8_3/tcl831.exe

and running it (Next, Next, Next... Finish!). I haven't gotten incrTcl yet,
but I'm assuming it's the same deal.

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

I was also hoping to sketch up some screen layout ideas and program
architecture diagrams that are sort of floating around in my brain. I'll post
something if it ever materializes.

Matt