info-mac@uw-beaver (01/28/85)
From: Rik Sprague <RIK@SU-CSLI.ARPA> I played with Experlogo for a few hours recently and wrote down a few random comments for anybody who's interested: I liked it a lot, and it sure would be nice if this usurped BASIC as a lingua franca on the Macintosh. The way they do 3-D graphics is impressive: something to do with "bunnies" that can yaw and pitch and roll. Looks awfully easy to rotate a cube, for example. The graphics speed was pretty good, but nothing to get excited about yet (admittedly this is a very crude first impression). That may have something to do with the fact that it's trying to draw on a screen with lots more pixels than a PC, but it didn't seem outrageously faster than DRI Logo; at least, not as fast as I had hoped. Takes up 124K on the disk. Comes with only 3 demo programs (one draws an arrow shooting at a target, another draws various patterns, the other demonstrates lists), none of which is very impressive. I couldn't find any way other than pressing the interrupt switch to get out of infinite loops, etc. Macintosh User Interface is well implemented: just a few minor problems, though, like when the active window doesn't automatically get moved to the front. I managed to get it to bomb when I was doing some rather kinky operations in the 3D graphics mode. Very tacky manual, photo offset from an imagewriter. Man, you'd think these companies could spend a few bucks and at least try to get their MacWrite documents laser printed. Organization and completeness of the manual looks okay, though (nothing to get excited about), but I really wish they had hired the same people who do the Apple manuals to do theirs. Uses a lot of LISP terminology for the file system: FASL, setENV, etc. They do their development on a Symbolics 3600 LISP Machine. Must be some development system. Written by: Dennison Bollay, Gray "Where's my car" Clossman, Steven Lurya, Robert W. Reali, Jon Richter, Dean Ritz, Oran Thomas, John Worthington. Do these names ring any bells? Overall, this product looks like something which the people at Expertelligence are very proud of. They probably put it out in record time and did all kinds of tricks to make it into something they think is the best. They obviously knew their LISP, and I can't wait to see ExperLISP. -------