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.]