Macintosh Programmer's Workshop
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An executable MPW Shell script
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| Developer(s) | Apple Computer |
|---|---|
| Initial release | September 24, 1986 |
| Stable release |
3.6d7
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| Operating system | Classic Mac OS |
| Type | Software development tool |
| License | closed-source freeware |
| Website | Official MPW website at the Wayback Machine (archived May 14, 2011) |
Macintosh Programmer's Workshop or MPW, is a software development environment for the Classic Mac OS operating system, written by Apple Computer. For Macintosh developers, it was one of the primary tools for building applications for System 7.x and Mac OS 8.x and 9.x. Initially MPW was available for purchase as part of Apple's professional developers program, but Apple made it a free download after it was superseded by CodeWarrior. On Mac OS X it was replaced by the Project Builder IDE, which eventually became Xcode.
MPW provided a command line environment and tools, including 68k and PowerPC assemblers as well as Pascal, C and C++ compilers. The shell environment is somewhat similar to Unix shells in design, but is designed around the Macintosh's character set and GUI, replacing the usual terminal environment with a "worksheet" interface, allowing the user to select and run arbitrary sections of a shell script or to redo commands with no retyping. In addition, command line tools were commonly provided with a somewhat standardized graphical interface named Commando that provided limited access to the command line capabilities of the program. The debuggers were not integrated into MPW like most IDEs of today but the language compilers supported the symbolic debugging information file format used by the debugger. MPW supported a source-level debugger called SADE (Symbolic Application Debugging Environment). SADE was not an MPW Tool, but ran as a separate application with a user interface similar to MPW.
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