mdella@polyslo.CalPoly.EDU (Marcos R. Della) (04/11/91)
In article <91100.145807SPRAGGEJ@QUCDN.QueensU.CA> SPRAGGEJ@QUCDN.QueensU.CA (John G. Spragge) writes: >In article <memo.898989@lynx.northeastern.edu>, cschmidt@lynx.northeastern.edu >says: >> >>The most effective thing Borland could do to improve their image among >>professional programmers would be to improve their documentation, > >Grown-ups should be aware of how difficult it is to write good >documentation. Grown-ups should be aware that the manual that looks >like a model of simplicity and clarity to them may be incomprehensible >to someone else. Generally, a manual is "good" if you understand it, >and "bad" if you don't. > >In other words, flame manuals only with extreme care! A manual is a >set of compromises: no documentation can satisfy everyone. Only in >cases of the most extreme ineptitude is a flame justified; and I >have yet to see Borland's documentation deserve flames. While I was working at Borland back in 1987, they had their publication department seperated from the R&D folks. The docs were written and outlined upstairs (R&D) then revised and gramatically corrected in the pubs dept. Once the product hit Q&A, they hacked the manual all that they could then it went back to pubs again to be cleaned up yet another time. There are quite a few people that get their hands into the docs business and considering all that goes on in the Q&A department to insure that the product going out the door is relatively bug free, the manuals are rather good! There are revisions all the way up to the time of release, thats why there is a readme file with each program to reflect the last minute changes. NOt everyone in the docs business has any idea what the product does. Several people just fix spelling, grammer, place the nice pictures in a good form, etc. The meat and potatoes information comes from previous manuals and what has been going on since then. Each revision of the program that has been distributed has been such a major change, that I find it rather hard to also list the compatability changes from past versions to the present. The only time I think this might have been possible was from 4.0 to 5.0. Check with Tech support. They generally know the revisions after the product has been out a few weeks... LOTS of feedback on the programs there... Marcos -- ..!csustan ->!polyslo!mdella | mdella@polyslo | Whatever I said doesn't ..!sdsu ---/ Marcos R. Della | (805) 544-4825 | mean diddly as I forgot ..!csun --/ 1663 Phillips Ln. / it even before finishing ..!dmsd -/ San Luis Obispo, CA 93401 / typing it all out!!! :-)
gen0030@husky1.stmarys.ca (04/12/91)
Help ! I am trying to do an assingment using random access file, building a B-Tree into the file.. in other words, instead of pointers, the program needs to have file component numbers for each node of the B-Tree. The problem we are having is that we cannot figure out how to handle the splitting of nodes without screwing up the component numbers..... Also, we cannot allocate x amount of memory so that each node has the max number of possible nodes because we have a liited amount of storage space. Any suggestions, comments, etc. would be appreciated ! thanks.
jordan@aero.org (Larry M. Jordan) (05/04/91)
Can one REALLY do serious Windows 3.0 programming with Turbo Pascal for Windows? (Or do I need SDK after all?) Is TPW identical to TP 6.0 in terms of Pascal dialect supported there?