Macintosh Programmer's Workshop

Macintosh Programmer's Workshop: Classic Mac OS Development Tools

Discover the original integrated development environment for creating Macintosh software, featuring an editor, debugger, and linker tools, released by Apple in 1985.

What is Macintosh Programmer's Workshop?

Macintosh Programmer's Workshop (MPW) was one of the first integrated development environments for the classic Mac OS operating system. It was developed and released by Apple in 1985 as a professional toolset for programmers to build software for the Macintosh platform.

MPW provided a complete set of tools including a text editor, compiler, assembler, linker, debugger, and more. It integrated all phases of development like writing code, translating to machine language, linking object code libraries, running and debugging into one cohesive system accessible through a command-line interface.

Some key features of MPW included:

• Editor with syntax highlighting and auto-indent for code files
• Support for multiple programming languages like C, C++, Pascal, Assembly, etc.
• Powerful debugger to step through code, examine variables, memory spaces etc.
• Build tools to assemble, compile and link source code into executables
• Extensible through scripts and external tools integration

MPW was very popular among Mac developers as it provided rich features rivaling expensive workstation environments. It played a big role in enabling rapid Mac application development throughout the 1980's and 90's. MPW influenced the architecture of later IDEs like Metrowerks CodeWarrior that eventually replaced it.

Macintosh Programmer's Workshop Features

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