info-mac@uw-beaver (01/18/85)
From: winkler@harvard.ARPA (Dan Winkler)
Here is the explorer desk accessory that comes with the Manx Aztec C
system. It is written by superprogrammer Jim Goodnow (who reportedly
produces bug-free C code faster than lex or yacc). Explorer is public
domain (sort of -- you can give it away but not sell it). It is the
first desk accessory we've heard of written entirely in C (almost --
there are a few lines of assembly at the beginning).
Explorer let's you browse through memory while an application is
running looking at memory as hex or as strings. The box at the top of
the explorer window lets you specify a start address for the display
(this is more convenient than scrolling through the half megabyte
address space on a Fat Mac).
First suggested use: cheating at Zork. If you look through Zork with
fedit you'll find that Zork encrypts its strings on the disk. But who
knows what you'll find when you look through RAM? It must decrypt them
sometime before displaying them. (If you look through the CP/M version
of WordStar with something like fedit, you'll find the message "Nosey,
aren't you?")
Manx says they are working on a source level C debugger. They were
going to devote their efforts to a resource editor instead, but they
decided they liked Apple's, licensed it, and stopped working on their
own. I've been using Aztec C on our Hyperdrive Mac. There are some
problems but overall I think it's still the best Mac development system
available (except for cost which is where Sumacc wins) and has the
fastest time from edit to run (compiles about as fast as Sumacc on a
normally loaded Vax and has no downloading; also supports overlays and
stdio). Text scrolling is much faster than it was in the beta release.
I used the beta release to compile the Mac version of xlisp that is
floating around. Maybe it's time to find the latest xlisp sources and
use this lates Manx compiler to compiler them.
So here is explor.c (the Manx C source of the explorer desk accessory)
and explor.hex (the binhex encoded version of the compiled explor
desk accessory).
Dan. (winkler@harvard)
[ As expected the source is in explor.c and the encoded version in explor.hex
-jma]info-mac@uw-beaver (01/24/85)
From: P. David Lebling <PDL@MIT-XX.ARPA> Explorer vs. Zork: Good luck! Zork strings aren't encrypted, just compacted. (There is an output buffer though). Dave -------