[Python-Dev] Portable "spawn" module for core?

[Jack Jansen]

Recently, Greg Ward <gward@cnri.reston.va.us> said:
> BTW, is there anything like this on the Mac?  On what other OSs does it
> even make sense to talk about programs spawning other programs?  (Surely
> those GUI user interfaces have to do *something*...)

Yes, but the interface is quite a bit more high-level, so it's pretty
difficult to reconcile with the Unix and Windows "every argument is a
string" paradigm. You start the process and pass along an AppleEvent
(basically an RPC-call) that will be presented to the program upon
startup.

So on the mac there's a serious difference between (inventing the API
interface here, cut down to make it understandable to non-macheads:-)
  spawn("netscape", ("Open", "file.html"))
and
  spawn("netscape", ("OpenURL", "http://foo.com/file.html"))

The mac interface is (of course:-) infinitely more powerful, allowing
you to talk to running apps, adressing stuff in it as COM/OLE does,
etc. but unfortunately the simple case of spawn("rm", "-rf", "/") is
impossible to represent in a meaningful way.

Add to that the fact that there's no stdin/stdout/stderr and there's
little common ground. The one area of common ground is "run program X
on files Y and Z and wait (or don't wait) for completion", so that is
something that could maybe have a special method that could be
implemented on all three mentioned platforms (and probably everything
else as well). And even then it'll be surprising to Mac users that
they have to _exit_ their editor (if you specify wait), not something
people commonly do.
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