From: UnixOS2 Archive To: "UnixOS2 Archive" Date: Tue, 8 Oct 2002 04:39:10 EST-10EDT,10,-1,0,7200,3,-1,0,7200,3600 Subject: [UnixOS2_Archive] No. 339 ************************************************** Monday 07 October 2002 Number 339 ************************************************** Subjects for today 1 perl, tk and a tax program : jimburke200 at earthlink.net (James E. Burke Jr.) 2 Re: perl, tk and a tax program : jimburke200 at earthlink.net (James E. Burke Jr.) 3 Re: Aw: Some news : Holger Veit 4 Re: perl, tk and a tax program : John Poltorak 5 Re: perl, tk and a tax program : Mikkel C. Simonsen" 6 Re: perl, tk and a tax program : Mikkel C. Simonsen" 7 Re: perl, tk and a tax program : John Poltorak **= Email 1 ==========================** Date: Tue, 08 Oct 2002 06:16:33 -0700 From: jimburke200 at earthlink.net (James E. Burke Jr.) Subject: perl, tk and a tax program I hate to bother this list, but I'd like a see response about getting a tax program to work with os/2. Here is the correspondence so far. from jay at scherrer.com Jim, Let your people know that CPAN is a terriffic site for all things Perl. And as far as our program "Practical Tax" goes, We will be using Tk only for the initial user interface. We plan to use Perl only as the data engine. Which can be used with several other user interfaces. Which means if we could some how write the interface in REXX and pass the data to Perl, then the program would be more suited to OS/2'ers. We'll have to work on that. I have done some REXX in my day. OS/2 was my first system since I broke away from MS. Jay On Monday 07 October 2002 10:48 am, you wrote: > Hi, Jay, > > I wish I were able to help, but I'm not a programmer. > > I posted your biz.comp.accounting notice on a private newsgroup server -- > news.ecomstation.nl in the ecomstation.apps newsgroup. eComStation is > the latest incarnation of os/2 and came with hoblink X11 which > I've managed (with help) to install gimp. > > I'm on a UnixOS2 mailing list where there is talk of perl and getting it > to compile, but the discussion is over my head. If you'd like, I can send > you the next > item about perl and you can see if the ports are close enough to work. I > erase the > messages so I don't have any right now that refer to perl. > > I'm afraid without help, I wouldn't know what to do after I untarred the > tarball. I could go to the newsgroup and see if I could get help. I'll keep > you posted if I get a response to my posting. There is no os/2 tax program > and we're almost forced to use windows to do any tax work. > > I just got the 1040.tar.gz and will see what I can do with it. Don't know > about Tk or > what version of Perl I can find for os/2. > > >Jim, > > > >On Monday 07 October 2002 09:34 am, you wrote: > >> Comment > >> http://jay.scherrer.com/screenshots.html > >> > >> Typo--preperation should be preparation. > >> > >> Any interest in having this work on os/2 either natively or under > >> hobllink X11 or XfreeOS/2? > > > >You betcha! There must be a Perl port to OS/2, isn't there? We are almost > >ready to release our first release of Practical tax. If you wan't to join > > in the fun try our link or the project site at > > . > >Thanks for the edit, We need more, > >Jay **= Email 2 ==========================** Date: Tue, 08 Oct 2002 09:15:26 -0700 From: jimburke200 at earthlink.net (James E. Burke Jr.) Subject: Re: perl, tk and a tax program I've just got perl (5.7.3 - a later version from what was on hobbes) , his files, and the latest gzip program. His files were viewable with epm, but the gzip wouldn't unzip them - error was tenfor~1.gz not in gzip format. Will try to install perl, I found TKL and see what happens. I have hoblink x11 but understand that it would only be necessary to use if I needed the unix perl, etc. Either way, it's the application that interests me. **= Email 3 ==========================** Date: Tue, 8 Oct 2002 12:42:01 +0200 From: Holger Veit Subject: Re: Aw: Some news On Fri, Oct 04, 2002 at 08:36:11AM +0100, Dave Saville wrote: > On Thu, 3 Oct 2002 17:37:40 +0200 (CEST), Stefan Neis wrote: > > > > >No problem to write such a beast on OS/2 (presumably), but delivering > >just a DLL, not a DLL plus an executable which must be installed in > >the "right" place was the whole point of the question. So I'll just stay > >with fork (and its inefficiencies) for the OS/2 case... > > I have read that fork is bad on OS/2 for as long as I can remember. > But I don't know why? Does it take too long, and does that matter on > todays processors? Or does it eat memory and does that matter with > todays memory sizes? Or what? > > Just curious. Fork is not bad in general, it is the implementation in EMX which is slow and tricky. What EMX effectively does is the following: start a new process as a child of the forking one (using a DosExecPgm variant), then connect parent and child through a pipe and transmit the complete memory map from the parent to the child, including open file handles, etc (part of the latter is already done by DosExecPgm itself). A side effect of this is that certain features of EMX, like multiple heaps, are not supported. When the process is completely copied, patch the return value of the fork call in the child process to return the correct value. The fork call has an awful lot to perform, and what for? Typically, fork is used in conjunction with exec*, i.e. the whole effort to duplicate the process, is often simply invain. This has also been observed under Unix, and BSD Unix thus invented a shortcut named vfork(), explicitly intended for the fork+exec pair, without so much overhead. You can in these cases implement vfork() with a special DosCreateThread construction, which is extremely fast, compared to EMX fork(), but unfortunately, EMX hasn't implemented the vfork(). fork() to be used without exec, however, isn't identical to multithreading in OS/2, because under Unix you still have two separate processes which over time will deviate from each other, when data is modified (Unix makes the data pages copy-on-write). You can only implement such a construction in the kernel, because you have to manipulate the paging tables of the processes (this, however, is by magnitudes faster than the EMX transfer of data between parent and child), which is why apparently noone hasn't dared to try it - VM management in OS/2 is a very difficult ground. Holger -- Please update your tables to my new e-mail address: holger.veit$ais.fhg.de (replace the '$' with ' at ' -- spam-protection) **= Email 4 ==========================** Date: Tue, 8 Oct 2002 16:06:29 +0100 From: John Poltorak Subject: Re: perl, tk and a tax program On Tue, Oct 08, 2002 at 06:16:33AM -0700, James E. Burke Jr. wrote: > I hate to bother this list, but I'd like a see response about getting a tax > program to work with os/2. Have you tried installing it? Both Perl and Tk are available for OS/2, although I have never tried Tk myself but I think there is a PM version so you may not even need to set up XFree... > Here is the correspondence so far. > > from jay at scherrer.com > > Jim, > Let your people know that CPAN is a terriffic site for all things Perl. > > And as far as our program "Practical Tax" goes, We will be using Tk only for > the initial user interface. We plan to use Perl only as the data engine. > Which can be used with several other user interfaces. Which means if we could > some how write the interface in REXX and pass the data to Perl, then the > program would be more suited to OS/2'ers. We'll have to work on that. I have > done some REXX in my day. OS/2 was my first system since I broke away from > MS. > Jay > On Monday 07 October 2002 10:48 am, you wrote: > > Hi, Jay, > > > > I wish I were able to help, but I'm not a programmer. > > > > I posted your biz.comp.accounting notice on a private newsgroup server -- > > news.ecomstation.nl in the ecomstation.apps newsgroup. eComStation is > > the latest incarnation of os/2 and came with hoblink X11 which > > I've managed (with help) to install gimp. > > > > I'm on a UnixOS2 mailing list where there is talk of perl and getting it > > to compile, but the discussion is over my head. If you'd like, I can send > > you the next > > item about perl and you can see if the ports are close enough to work. I > > erase the > > messages so I don't have any right now that refer to perl. > > > > I'm afraid without help, I wouldn't know what to do after I untarred the > > tarball. I could go to the newsgroup and see if I could get help. I'll keep > > you posted if I get a response to my posting. There is no os/2 tax program > > and we're almost forced to use windows to do any tax work. > > > > I just got the 1040.tar.gz and will see what I can do with it. Don't know > > about Tk or > > what version of Perl I can find for os/2. > > > > >Jim, > > > > > >On Monday 07 October 2002 09:34 am, you wrote: > > >> Comment > > >> http://jay.scherrer.com/screenshots.html > > >> > > >> Typo--preperation should be preparation. > > >> > > >> Any interest in having this work on os/2 either natively or under > > >> hobllink X11 or XfreeOS/2? > > > > > >You betcha! There must be a Perl port to OS/2, isn't there? We are almost > > >ready to release our first release of Practical tax. If you wan't to join > > > in the fun try our link or the project site at > > > . > > >Thanks for the edit, We need more, > > >Jay > > -- John **= Email 5 ==========================** Date: Tue, 08 Oct 2002 16:55:07 +0100 From: "Mikkel C. Simonsen" Subject: Re: perl, tk and a tax program James E. Burke Jr. wrote: > > I hate to bother this list, but I'd like a see response about getting a tax > program to work with os/2. Mesa2 and my TI-68 works fine for my taxes... Best regards, Mikkel C. Simonsen **= Email 6 ==========================** Date: Tue, 08 Oct 2002 16:55:07 +0100 From: "Mikkel C. Simonsen" Subject: Re: perl, tk and a tax program James E. Burke Jr. wrote: > > I hate to bother this list, but I'd like a see response about getting a tax > program to work with os/2. Mesa2 and my TI-68 works fine for my taxes... Best regards, Mikkel C. Simonsen **= Email 7 ==========================** Date: Tue, 8 Oct 2002 20:32:24 +0100 From: John Poltorak Subject: Re: perl, tk and a tax program On Tue, Oct 08, 2002 at 09:15:26AM -0700, James E. Burke Jr. wrote: > I've just got perl (5.7.3 - a later version from what was on hobbes) , his > files, and the latest gzip program. His files were viewable with epm, but > the gzip wouldn't unzip them - error was tenfor~1.gz not in gzip format. I didn't have any problems extracting the files from:- http://tenforty.sourceforge.net/archives/source/Ptax2001.tar.gz I just needed to run:- tar zxf Ptax2001.tar.gz > Will try to install perl, I found TKL and see what happens. I have hoblink x11 > but understand that it would only be necessary to use if I needed the unix > perl, etc. > Either way, it's the application that interests me. You should be able to find an OS/2 PM version of TCL/TK in:- http://hobbes.nmsu.edu/pub/os2/dev/tcl -- John