cute@sphinx.uchicago.edu (John Robert Cavallino) (03/01/88)
In article <700@nuchat.UUCP> peter@nuchat.UUCP (Peter da Silva) writes: >In article <682@sandino.quintus.UUCP>, pds@quintus.UUCP (Peter Schachte) writes: >> In the following quote, you omitted an important part. I proposed an >> IFF form for program source code that would allow an editor to mark >> what had changed since the last time the program was compiled. > >No, no, no, a thousand times no. Look at the way the Mac is isolated in its >own pretty little room by its programming model. A large part of this is >due to the fact that source code on this baby includes a weird proprietary >chunk of data called the resource fork. The last thing the Amiga needs is >to duplicate more of the negative aspects of the Mac. Sigh. At its simplest, the Macintosh resource system is really just OS-supported access to initialized constant data. The original reason it was done was to allow easy translation of culture-specific user interface things (strings mainly) WITHOUT having to recompile the program, or to have any access to the source. It also makes laying out those annoyingly complex window and gadget structs SO much easier, because you can do it using an interactive graphically-oriented editor (much like the late lamented Gadget Editor) and then it doesn't clutter up your source. There's also a standardized, extensible source language with a C-like syntax, and several compilers/decompilers/interactive editors available commercially and through shareware, so it's not exactly "wierd" or "proprietary". BTW, Later on people noticed that the implementation made for a pretty nifty poor man's virtual memory system, with very low overhead, and many other parts of the OS (including the code loader) were built on top of the resource manager. Rather than being one of the "negative aspects" of the Macintosh, I think it's actually one of its more interesting innovations. Cheers. -- ...ihnp4!gargoyle!sphinx!cute --John Cavallino The train is the same, only the time is changed. Ecce homo, ergo elk.