info-mac@utcsrgv.UUCP (info-mac) (05/05/84)
Date: Fri 4 May 84 14:03:27-PDT From: Chad Leland Mitchell <uw-beaver!M.CHAD@SU-SIERRA.ARPA> Subject: standalone To: info-mac@SUMEX-AIM.ARPA It depends what you call stand alone. Apple has told me that they will have a compiled Pascal by the end of the year. The problem with both that and the assembler is that to run the fancy debugger you need two Macs. (You can certainly develop, compile, and test with just one.) Since the Mac has no hardware memory management, a program under test could easily write into a debugger's data space and in any case it would have to somehow share the screen and limited RAM with the debugger. The interpreted Pascal and Basic avoid this problem by limiting what can be done, but for the assembler and compiled Pascal you would certainly want control of the full screen, menus, etc. The fancy debugger thus winds up on a second machine and built into the ROM is some kind of manager which allows the program being debugged to have the machine only sacrificing a tiny amount of RAM for some debugger state. I am sure that there will be languages with "stand alone" debuggers, but they will not be as nice as what can be done with two machines. Maybe when we have 512 you could have a debugger which would have its own copy of the entire screen and you could toggle between the application screen and the development screen. For Jerry: I know several students who feel that the Mac already has the programs they need. With just MacWrite and MacPaint they consider it the ideal homework machine. What other serious things could they need? They suggest maybe a spread sheet program (MultiPlan is out and the new version seems to work) and a few games (a few are already announced). They seem to feel that they can do everything on a Mac right now that they would be doing on any other machine and do it better. They would like to see sub/super scripts and longer files in MacWrite but a new release of it has been announced. They claim that they would rather segment papers for the time being on the Mac than deal with any of the ^X^Y^S.C.L style word processors they have used before, but they they are not hackers. They are of course hoping for even better software and sooner or later they will get it, but they are already satisfied and find the Mac a useful and important tool. About Color: There are two DIFFERENT color mechanisms according to my copy of Inside Macintosh. One is the one mentioned in a previous message which tells which of 32 bit planes in which to draw and is called by printing software for a color printer or other color imaging software. The other color mechanism is accessed by routines that set the foreground and background color of the pen. Thus you CAN set it to red and draw a box and then to blue and draw a circle or some text. It is very clear that this second mechanism is for the screen so I think that we may very well see color eventually. They even have predefined constants for colors red, green, blue, cyan, magenta, yellow and of course black and white and carefully specify that if you write to the screen in any color other than white it uses black instead for present. Chad -------