[comp.sys.amiga] Letter to the Authors of ARP

PERUGIA@ICNUCEVM.BITNET (Carlo Borreo c/o Cesare Dieni) (10/31/88)

Dear ArpMen,
            I am a (happy) ARP programmer. I use both Lattice and Manx C
compilers, but I ALWAYS open arp.library as the first thing.
The following is a list of improvement suggestions and problems found.

 SUGGESTED IMPROVEMENTS

 - Arp.library is GREAT in reducing code size, especially for short programs.
   In particolar, using Printf and FPrintf one can avoid to get a lot of
   code for printf/fprintf. However, if one needs to use sprintf, this
   effort is vanified. What I think ARP lacks is a SPrintf function (I
   think that it should be easy to implement, and that it shouldn't make
   library significantly bigger).

 - I don't like the behaviour of Atol when it finds a non-digit char.
   When I call Atol("35cows") I would expect a value of 35, not 'c'!

 - Pattern matching routines are good, but two powerful matching could be
   added. These are:

      ! exclude
          Example: LIST !*.info lists all files excluding .info)
      & query
        Prefixed to a pattern, allows the user to interactively select
        only part of files matching.
           Example: DELETE &*.c
           Foreach <file> matching *.c, display "Select <file> (y/n) ? "
           and wait for user response. If response is NO, file is
           considered not matching.
           The example above  is equivalent to DELETE *.c ASK, but
           implementing query matching is like giving ASK option to all
           commands that use pattern matching (thus improving consistancy).

 - GADS would need a /N switch to get numeric values, so for instance
   the pattern for STACK could be SIZE/N.

 - It would be useful to have high-level I/O functions (like fopen,
   getc, putc, etc.) in library.
   A lot of Amiga programs link in their executable a lot of code to
   use it, and many others use only low-level I-O. ARP could make
   many programs smaller and/or faster this way.

 - It is difficult to get something useful resident. I tried LC1, LC2 and
   Blink from Lattice, CC, AS, LN from MANX, Emacs editor, and all of these
   failed to run twice. REZ program from Jim Goodnow II (bix:jgoodnow,
   usenet:manx@well) works with all of them. Maybe it could be
   useful to specify no-checksum for some programs (warning people
   that it is dangerous).

 PROBLEMS FOUND

 - Mount command won't work on 68010 machines. I know Decigel exists, but
   I want to Mount VD0: or RD0: as the FIRST thing in my startup-sequence.

 - In ARP programmer's manual, function Getenv is called GetEnv (wrong
   case).

I would like to point out that these are the ONLY problems I have found
in some months of use. I am *VERY* satisfied with Arp v34, I only hope
v35 to be better (don't you ?).

                                        Carlo Borreo

vkr@osupyr.mast.ohio-state.edu (Vidhyanath K. Rao) (11/01/88)

In article <8810292009.AA02594@jade.berkeley.edu> PERUGIA@ICNUCEVM.BITNET
 (Carlo Borreo c/o Cesare Dieni) writes:
>[suggestion s about ARP improvments] 
> - Pattern matching routines are good, but two powerful matching could be
>   added. These are:
>      ! exclude
>          Example: LIST !*.info lists all files excluding .info)

According to the ARP programmers' manual, there are bugs in the character
class/exclude charater class matching. I would like to see them get fixed
first. [I can vouch for the bug. I was caught by it when I had read the
users' manual but not the programmers' manual.]