Applescript,	Frontier	and	MacPERL

Computers are supposed to make life easier, and even though some things seem more complex, there is (mostly) a range of new possibilities (Just imagine writing on a mechanical type-writer and making a crucial mistake on the last line of a page...)

Or now when internet becomes more and more important to more and more people; wouldn't it be nice to have your e-mail and some daily updated web pages fetched along with a message of when your own web pages last were modified (to make sure no one tampered with them) when you get to your machine?

These kind of things are easily accomplished in an easily customized way with "scripts", i.e. small programs written in one of the different available scripting languages. These languages are specifically designed to make these kind of things fast and easy (that is, compared to "real" programming)

The open scripting architecture (OSA) and Apple-events make scripting on a macOS-compatible computer really fun - the strength approaches scripting on unix. Applescript is included with the system software from system 7.5, Userland Frontier is Userland's application and developing environment for their own very powerful scripting language Usertalk and Applescript - Userland currently is porting Frontier to windows -, while MacPERL is a port to the mac of PERL - the Practical Extraction and Report Language (available for lots of different computer platforms), a very fast and efficient way to do searches (and replacings) in any number of text files of any sizes, has come to be the most common language for cgi-scripting.

We have some examples, mostly (only?} applescript, as most of our perl and frontier stuff is a bit too specialized to be of general interest.