roth@oasys.dt.navy.mil (Pete Roth) (04/19/91)
Comments on "Turbo Vision Guide, first printing".
Simultaneous e-mail to bugs@borland.com and posting to the net...
In general, this is one of the better Borland programmer's manuals.
However, the intent here is to point to flaws and errors, the adjustment of
which will improve the product. Most of my comments are requests for
clearer documentation (marked with '-'); those marked with ** are _errors_
in documentation.
- Tone has improved over some of the earlier 'cutesy-pie' manuals.
However, the phrase 'Luckily, Turbo Vision facilitates...' occurs in several
places. Omit the word 'luckily'.
- Ch 3, section 'Object instantiations and derivations',
subsection 'Instantiation': print the word "variable" in bold face.
subsection 'Derivation': print the word "type" in bold face.
- Ch4, 'Simple View Objects', 'Turbo vision coordinates':
- figure 4.1 needs X & Y shown on it. ( --> X, etc.)
** R.Assign(2,2,4,5) should be R.Assign(2,2,5,4) (two places)
^^^ ^^^
- Somewhere in Ch4 it would be helpful (to me) to know that the picture
appearing on the screen is being put together as a linked list. It may be in
there, but i don't recall seeing it.
- Ch4 'Overriding the default colors': Color mapping in TVision is a kludge &
hard to understand. A couple more lines in 'Adding new colors' might help
by explaining the difference between the contents and the location of the
contents.
- Ch5 'The nature of events': I _expected_ events to be objects. Although TV
was designed with Events as records, the justification for this is weak.
-Ch 10, 'Using bitmapped fields': so why aren't the bitmapped fields objects?
with methods that allow bit-setting, -clearing, -masking, etc?
** Ch 13, TGroup, "procedure SelectNext(Forwards: Boolean);": WRONG! My version
of TV works exactly opposite to this documentation...
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Peter N Roth roth@oasys.dt.navy.mil
Objects in this office are closer than they appear.