hsgj@batcomputer.TN.CORNELL.EDU (Dan Green) (06/09/86)
I have been using v1.2 Kickstart/Workbench, and the most impressive part of the system is the "official" release of microEMACS. For anyone who doesn't have the upgrade yet, or doesn't use emacs, this new version is really nice because (a) it has menus, and (b) it has interlace. Menus serve as great online help, and interlace means you can get 48 lines of text on the screen, which really aids in editing two files at a time (cause each file then gets ~20+ lines). PLEA TO COMMODORE: Please release the source for the mods you made to emacs, I think it would be educational to look at them. Sybex mini-review: I have Sybex's book called Programming the Amiga or some other name. It is about 300 pages and bills itself as a reference for C programming the Amiga. It is divided into several sections. Offhand, I think they are: Exex, Graphics, Layers, Intuition, Workbench. Of course, the book is not with me here, so I can't be more specific (sigh). I have been using the Intuition part of the book because J.R. (he knows who he is) still has my intuition manual. The Sybex book documents all the calls, but in a really confusing fashion. The worst example I can think of is the Menu functions, ie: SetMenuStrip, ClearMenuStrip, etc. The g-d d-mn book never tells you what the struct for Menu, MenuItems, or MenuItemText looks like! If it wasn't for the examples of speechtoy.c, (excellent program!) and looking in the .h, I would never have gotten my menues to work. Well, the point of this is that don't buy the Sybex book if you don't already have the other manuals, because it is not going to help you that much. There are no examples whatsoever, and everything is described in english, and not in code. In other words, I wished the author would have listed how to initialize a structure in C, not in lots of non-understandable words. KERMIT: While I am here, I guess I should bring this up. CU20B does not have the kermit source (.c) files for amiga kermit. CUVMA has the source, but BITNET load has been really high and CUVMA won't send them out. I would really like the sources, but if no one will mail them to me then perhaps someone at Columbia could move them from CUVMA to CU20B. Just a thought... -- Dan Green ARPA: hsgj@vax2.ccs.cornell.edu ~~~~~~~~~ BITNET: hsgj@cornella UUCP: {decvax,ihnp4,allegra}!cornell!batcomputer!hsgj