ali@navajo.STANFORD.EDU (Ali Ozer) (09/16/86)
In article oster@lapis.berkeley.edu.UUCP (David Phillip Oster) writes: >I am not a great amiga expert, but the mac has some definate advantages >for the programmer in certain areas: > Text handling - when the mac was released, they gave me a one page > pascal program that implemented a mouse based text editor with cut, > copy, and paste. I sincerely doubt you could do as much on the amiga as > concisely. > > Sound - recently net.micro.amiga had a note from R.J.Micah, one of the > designers of the Amiga's software, giving three pages of C code to do > what a mac programmer does as "SysBeep(1)" Most amiga programmers use > the equivalent of MacInTalk to make their machine say "Beep" because it > is too hard to get a tone out of it. Hmm, Pascal on the Mac is more like Basic on the Amiga than like C on the Amiga. AmigaBasic is a wonderful language that lets you do truly neat things with one or two statements. You can trace, open windows, Beep as much as you like, cut/paste, etc... So you shouldn't be comparing Mac Pascal to Amiga C, you should be comparing Mac Pascal to AmigaBasic. Using C on the Amiga, you can make the hardware do things a Mac (or even a Mac owner) can't even dream of... But if you wanted to create useless little cut/paste text editors, I'm sure it could be done with AmigaBasic as easily as it could be done with Pascal on the Mac. Amiga is a much more powerful machine than the Mac. Any Mac owner doubting that should find someone who owns an Amiga and have them demonstrate Marble Madness and Mind Walker. Then they should also see how Amiga programmers can use Emacs and C concurrently, and even read news on the net while the compiler is running in the background. For kicks, you should also see how Amiga programmers can have Musicraft playing their favorite tunes in the background while they are working on their C programs. > Resources - The Mac has a what-you-see-is-what-you-get editor called > the resource editor that allows you to change menus, fonts, icons, and > every detail of alerts and dialogs (requestors on the Amiga) without > ever recompiling. An amiga programmer must laborously speel out these > things in C code that does not look at all like the finished product. Unfortunately Mac "what you see is what you get things" are not ALWAYS "what you see is what you get". Just last week I was using MacDraw and could not get my bold face courier fonts (that looked columnized on the screen and acted columnized) print columnized on the LaserWriter. Unless "what you see is what you get" works all the time, then it's worthless. > safety - the amiga crashes if you draw a line that extends outside the > screen. (According to a friend who regularly crashes his amiga this > way.) The mac graphics system calls, although they aren't very safe, > are safer than this! That is how real programmers like it! Come on, I would hate to have the OS spend half its time checking my parameters when I'm trying to run 300x200 life on the at 20 generations/sec. (By the way, add Tom Rokicki's LIFE game, written in less than 3 days, to the above list of things to see on an Amiga.) > ... The Amiga's operating system is written in > BCPL. BCPL is a ancient British language that was directly responsible > for the birth of C. The designers of C started out in BCPL and > concluded that it was not possible to make a BCPL compiler that > generated decent code for a byte addressable machine. Hmmm, I've yet to meet this BCPL, I wonder where it is hiding in my machine? I have an OS that I can use from C, what does it matter how it was written? What was the Mac operating system written in, C? Or PASCAL? Probably 68000. >--- David Phillip Oster -- "The goal of Computer Science is to >Arpa: oster@lapis.berkeley.edu -- build something that will last at >Uucp: ucbvax!ucblapis!oster -- least until we've finished building it." Ali Ozer, Ali@score.stanford.edu
tim@ism780c.UUCP (Tim Smith) (09/18/86)
In article <837@navajo.STANFORD.EDU> ali@navajo.UUCP (Ali Ozer) writes: > >Hmm, Pascal on the Mac is more like Basic on the Amiga than like C on the >Amiga. AmigaBasic is a wonderful language that lets you do truly >neat things with one or two statements. You can trace, open windows, >Beep as much as you like, cut/paste, etc... Uh, excuse me, but Pascal on the Mac does nothing special. It's all just calls to the OS. A C program to do something and a Pascal program to do the same thing both end up being about the same number of lines. >run 300x200 life on the at 20 generations/sec. Amiga definitely wins here. The fastest I have seen life on the Mac is about 450,000 cells/second, while the Amiga seems to do 1,200,000. This whole discussion has gotten silly. Give me any two reasonable machines, and two weeks to play with them, and tell me which machine you want to be better, and I can prove to you that it is. ps: I am glad to finally see an Amiga owner who can say "Mac" rather than "MAC"! -- "I don't want no god on my lawn, just a flower I can help along" Tim Smith USENET: sdcrdcf!ism780c!tim Compuserve: 72257,3706 Delphi or GEnie: mnementh
tim@ism780c.UUCP (Tim Smith) (09/19/86)
In article <3604@ism780c.UUCP> I (The Center of the Multiverse) write: > >Amiga definitely wins here. The fastest I have seen life on the Mac is >about 450,000 cells/second, while the Amiga seems to do 1,200,000. > Oops! Make that 250,000 cells/second. 450,000 cells/second was my life program on the Callan Unistar 300. -- Are we not men? Tim Smith USENET: sdcrdcf!ism780c!tim Compuserve: 72257,3706 Delphi or GEnie: mnementh
rokicki@navajo.STANFORD.EDU (Tomas Rokicki) (09/22/86)
> >Amiga definitely wins here. The fastest I have seen life on the Mac is > >about 450,000 cells/second, while the Amiga seems to do 1,200,000. > Oops! Make that 250,000 cells/second. 450,000 cells/second was my > life program on the Callan Unistar 300. > Tim Smith USENET: sdcrdcf!ism780c!tim Compuserve: 72257,3706 I just sat down last night and wrote a 68000 assembly language Life routine which does 494,000 generations per second in the data-independent mode, and averages about 600,000 generations per second in the data-dependent mode. This is on the Amiga's 7.2 MHz processor. Maybe I should post it so someone can move it to the Mac? I'm thinking of writing a general-purpose life program, complete with cut-and-paste and library cells (like glider guns and various flotillas), forward and back panning, true infinite plane (until memory runs out; on a 2.5Meg Amiga, that shouldn't happen too soon.) Oh, by the way. I suspect that my 68000 life program will actually run faster than the blitter when run on a 68020 Amiga; anyone have one out there? -tom