ELLIOT@STAR3.STANFORD.EDU (Elliot Bennett) (12/13/88)
I just wanted to add my 2 cents worth about LSP 2.0. It seems that a major-
ity of the people on the net do a large amount of complaining and not so much
"positive reinforcement." (This isn't a complaint in and of itself, just an
observation.) Anyway, I thought, after getting my upgrade last week, that I
might balance this out a bit.
In my (humble :-) opinion, LSP 2.0 is a GREAT (albeit a little late) product!
The user-interface is superb, it's fast, the manual is excellent, and it
seemed to work fine "right out of the box." I, for one, am VERY content
with what they've (finally) came out with.
That said, I have only one relatively minor (yet still anoying) complaint
/request (don't they all?): Comments. Commenting in LSP is non-standard
Pascal. and, on occassion, it's VERY annoying. Basically, I don't understand
why each line of a comment has to end with a brace. Surely the compiler
could be made smart enough to skip down till it found a 'close comment brace'?
I mean, it can't be THAT hard, can it? Ah, but "Why?", you ask? Well, if I
have 25 lines of code I want to comment out, I really don't want to sit down
and type out 48 more braces than I would have to in MPW. Now, I happened to
accidently discover by falling into Appendix B in the reference manual, that
using the "conditional compilation command":
{$IFC False}
... code...
{$ENDC}
will comment out everything in between. But with such a nice user-interface
already employeed in the program, why make users hack like this? (A small
side note: though the manual is generally excellent, the index didn't have
this handy little trick referenced under "Comments"- but then, nothing's
perfect! :-). Not only that, but coverting code written in STANDARD Pascal
(which WOULD use only 2 braces in 50 lines of comments) becomes a real pain
to port. However, after all is said and done, I don't do this too often,
so I'm willing to wait for LSP 3.0! ;-).
So, I guess the final verdict is that if you don't comment your code (or have
always hated commenting and want a great excuse not too), then LSP 2.0 is for
you!! (Awww, pretty pretty please Rich, can you fix this?)
That's all I have to say (for now).
Elliot Bennett
elliot@star.stanford.edu
2 "standard" disclaimers:
1) I am only a (generally) satisfied user of LSP and
2) I have no relation to anyone except myself, and then only rarely.
So stand also my opinions...
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