Re: Proposed Mac::Pasteboard

On Jan 27, 2008, at 10:53 AM, [email protected] wrote:

> On Jan 27, 10:49 am, [email protected] (Chas. Owens) wrote:
>> On Jan 26, 2008 10:46 PM,  <[email protected]> wrote:
>>
>>> On Jan 22, 2:31 am, [email protected] (Brian D Foy) wrote:
>>>> [[ This message was both posted and mailed: see
>>>>   the "To," "Cc," and "Newsgroups" headers for details. ]]
>>
>>>> In article
>>>> <
>>>> 012120080315.17779.47940E4B0005B0340000457322007507440B0B9A0300979D9D0E
>>
>>>> [email protected]>, <[email protected]> wrote:
>>>>> Is there a module that will let one manipulate a Mac OS X  
>>>>> pasteboard? There
>>>>> does not seem to be anything on CPAN that strikes me as being  
>>>>> for that
>>>>> purpose.
>>
>>>> I'd like to have such a thing, although you should call it
>>>> Mac::Clipboard :)
>>
>>> I dithered about this. The arguments as I see them are:
>>
>>> For Mac::Clipboard
>>
>>> 1) That's what most people call the thing.
>>
>>> For Mac::Pasteboard
>>
>>> 1) It's what the Apple documentation calls it.
>>
>>> 2) There's a lot more to it than (e.g.) Win32::Clipboard. For one
>>> thing, there's more than one of them -- in fact, as many as you  
>>> like.
>>> Each can have multiple data items, with data in multiple flavors.
>>
>> snip
>>
>> Why choose?  Write Mac::Pasteboard with all of the bells and whistles
>> and then write Mac::Clipboard using Mac::Pasteboard to expose only  
>> the
>> clipboard.  In the SEE ALSO section you can reference Mac::Pasteboard
>> and people who need the advanced functionality can find it.
>
> Interesting thought. The straightforward implementation would be to
> have Mac::Clipboard depend on Mac::Pasteboard (since there's no
> simplified clipboard interface that I have found). But it seems un-
> parsimonious to me to use namespace for maybe a dozen lines of Perl,

[snip]

Maybe that's not a bad thing. And it wouldn't really limit the  
potential of the namespace. Starting with your Mac::Clipboard (which  
would inherit from Mac::Pasteboard) we might see:
	Mac::Clipboard::Persistent - provide the ability to cache the  
clipboard;
	M::C::History - store clipboard values cumulatively with meta-data  
(time-stamp, ...);
	M::C::Multiple - provide multiple clipboards a la some GUI apps
	M::C::Calculate - provide a stack for calculations with multiple  
copied values
	...
All of these would work in the "functionality-space" of "The  
Clipboard", which isn't quite the same as accessing other features of  
the Pasteboard, from the user's POV.

Regardless of the name, thanks for alerting me and others to the  
interesting capabilities of the OS X Pasteboard.

Best,

	- Bruce

__bruce__van_allen__santa_cruz__ca__