info-mac@uw-beaver (info-mac) (07/31/84)
From: Jerold Wallis <WALLIS@SUMEX-AIM.ARPA>
If someone is listening from Apple, slight modifications of Macwrite
could include
1 Ability to select the entire document with a single command, perhaps
via the edit menu, rather than having to move through
the document extending the selection.
2 Addition to the Style menu (in addition to Bold, Italics etc) of a Visable
option, whigh would make visable spaces, tabs, returns etc. This would not
only facilitate fine formatting, but would also make it easier to
explain to novices that spaces and tabs are characters rather than absence
of characters, and that they can be inserted, deleted, moved etc.
I suspect that these would be fairly minor changes. It would also be useful
to limit the extent of a Change all, but I suspect this would be harder to
impliment unless it were made to operate only in the selected area of text (in
which case the "select entire document" command above could be used to change
in the whole document if desired.
Whith Mac Pascal and MacBasic (hopefully)appearing soon, and MacBasic assuming
some characteristics of a structured language, is anyone with access to
prereleased versions of these able to comment on a comparision between
them,especially as regards:
True function calls and subroutines (and Recursion?)
Maximal program size
Speed (are they both precompiled into P-code, or only MacBasic)
Access to Rom routines
Utimate availability of a compiler to conver to machine code
If this cannot be answered now, when such information becomes available could
someone summarize it and post it.
J.Wallis (Wallis@sumex)
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