MPW Command Reference for Apple Macintosh Programmer's Workshop (MPW) Version 303 Ref: 030-4058-A.

Macintosh Programmer's Workshop (MPW) was a software development environment for the Classic Mac OS operating system and was an important tool for developing applications for System 7.x and Mac OS 8.x and 9.x. It was  part of Apple's professional developers program, but became a free download after it was superseded by CodeWarrior. On Mac OS X it was replaced by the Project Builder IDE (Integrated Development Environment, which eventually became Xcode.

MPW provided a command line environment and tools, including 68k and PowerPC  assemblers,  Pascal,  C  and  C++  compilers. The  Unix like shell was designed around the Macintosh's character set and GUI, using  a worksheet interface, rather than the usual terminal one, allowing the user to select and run sections of a shell script or to redo commands. In addition, command line tools were provided with a graphical interface named Commando. The debuggers were not integrated but the language compilers supported the symbolic debugging information file format and a source-level debugger called SADE (Symbolic Application Debugging Environment) which was not an MPW Tool but had a user interface similar to MPW. Apple's compilers had some features that were not common on other platforms—for example, the Pascal compiler was object-oriented, while the C and C++ compilers included support for length-prefixed strings (needed for Pascal-oriented APIs).

As Pascal was the original preferred language for Macintosh software development, MPW was initially released with only Pascal support. A C compiler was released with MPW 2.0. The MPW C compiler was written under contract for Apple by Greenhills, a Macintosh-variant of the Green Hills C compiler designed specially for Apple and similar to that of Apple Lisa Workshop.

MPW Command Reference is a command dictionary that describes each of the scripts, tools, and built-in commands available for use with the Macintosh Programmer's Workshop (MPW), as described above. Following the command dictionary are appendixes describing the special characters and operators.

Sections of the Reference

For each entry, the reference begins with a heading line that includes the command name and a label indicating whether the command is a script, tool, or built-in command.

For each command, the reference provides the following information:

• Syntax -- a concise listing of the syntax for invoking the command

• Description -- an explanation of the command's function

• Input -- information on the command's input

• Output -- information on the command's output

• Status -- a list of possible status codes and their meanings

• Parameters -- a description of each of the command's parameters

• Options -- a description of each of the command's options

For some commands, the reference also includes these sections:

• Alias Resolution -- information about the command's ability to resolve Finder aliases

• Examples -- examples of how to use the command

• Limitations -- a list of limitations, special cases, or warnings

• See Also -- references to related commands or information

Platform: Apple Macintosh 68K processor

               Mac OS System 7 and above

Application Software (AS:) Integrated Development Environment

Version: 303