awd@dbase.UUCP (Alastair Dallas) (07/29/88)
I promised to post when LightspeedC 3.0 arrived. I did; I am; it took almost
six weeks check to package. It's as good as everyone says. Two things that
I hadn't learned from this net: 1) You can only have one pre-compiled header
(okay by me--they give you MacHeaders which is customizable, completely
replacable, or you can just bask in the convenience of it all). Thing 2)
is that I had the impression from a posting someone made that the manual was
fluffy with respect to a precise description of the language. The poster
complained that ANSI and differences from the draft standard were skirted.
True, but the manual includes a point-by-point description of subtle
differences between LSC and K & R C, using the section numbers from
Appendix A in K & R. Using this description, you can figure out what's
missing from ANSI--I noticed, for instance, that 'const' and 'volatile' are
not reserved words. Also, I'm not sure, but I think that although prototypes
are supported (including noise identifiers, as in int myf(char *src,char *dst)
as opposed to int myf(char *, char *)), they require the old format of
function specification:
int myf(src, dst)
char *src, *dst;
{ ... }
instead of
int myf(char *src, char *dst)
{ ... }
This is only a problem if you want your prototypes to be liftable from your
code. No big deal.
The other thing about the new version is that the manual seems very good.
It's a paperback book (and there's a second volume describing the Unix
libraries that I don't plan to use much). Although the K&R stuff is in
there, the book is quite suitable for someone just starting a night-school
class on C. It assumes very little knowledge. They ship Hello,World which
uses the Unix libraries; MiniEdit, which demonstrates the Mac interface,
and Bullseye, which demonstrates the debugger. The debugger has been
praised to death; I'll chime in when I have something to add.
I also took delivery of a Mac II today; 40MB internal, extended keyboard,
1 MB :-(. Call me irresponsible, but I just ordered a 19" Trinitron monitor
(RasterOps) and a SuperMac Spectrum/8 card for it. Apple says I can cancel
my back-ordered 4MB (~$1000) and buy it from a third party (~$1500).
Such enlightened trade practices. Hooray for the free market. Where
do I get the money for these toys? Believe it or not, I'm selling my house
and moving into an apartment. How does anyone else afford it?
/alastair/erik_selberg@pedro.UUCP (Erik Selberg) (08/06/88)
Alastair-=> took 6 weeks, huh? I got mine in about 3 days, but I wish I didn't. LSC is nice and wonderful, granted, although it does have one major setback (the prime reason I hate it): hardware requirements. This is oblivious to people like you who are fortunate enough to have a MacII, but to poor developers like me who are still jammin' on a 512E (with 512K), the word "AARRRGGGHHH!!!" quickly comes to mind. Besides: who has 2 megs that's still on a college budget??? Erik "I still love LSP" Selberg
drc@claris.UUCP (Dennis Cohen) (08/31/88)
If you have only 512K, you probably are going to have a problem with LSP 2.0 as well. I don't have it yet, but saw the alpha version at Boston and seem to recall a hardware requirement of 1MB (could be wrong on this, but I don't think so). As I recall, LSP 1.11 was barely usable on 512K in that you don't have any room around for INITs, etc. Of course, you could run 1.11 with System 3.2, but I'm willing to bet that 2.0 will require System 4.1 or some later release because of their use of popup menus -- this will pretty much alienate the 512K market. As people (read that, potential sales) demand more features and faster performance, products will get larger and take advantage of new OS capabilities. This will gradually disenfranchise those parts of the customer base who are unable or unwilling to keep up with the technology. The folks at Think/Symantec try very hard to not orphan these folks, but in some cases it is unavoidable if they are to remain a viable operation (read profit-making). Most (not all, but most) large Mac software development houses weigh the impact on sales of not supporting the lower-end machines very seriously. I know that when I was with Ashton-Tate that it wasn't until about 6 months before ship that the bullet was finally bitten concerning 512Ke and Lisa. We wanted to support them, but the feature list precluded it. Dennis Cohen ------------ Disclaimer: Any opinions expressed above are _MINE_!