earleh@eleazar.Dartmouth.EDU (Earle R. Horton) (01/07/88)
HELP! I have been awarded use of a MacII for six months for the purpose of developing a graphical simulation of stellar electromagnetic fields and radiation patterns. I hope to put together a program which will allow scientists to input physical parameters (mass, rate of rotation, magnetic field strength, etc.) into one window, and view changes in the star's behavior in another window. I would like some advice from MacII users on "What is the best choice of programming tools to use?" Here is what comes with the MacII: Color Monitor (with 8 bit video card) 80 MB Internal hard disk Ethertalk Card A/UX and Macintosh Operating System MPW and MacApp HyperCard (Sorry, no more details available yet.) Here is a digest of my resume: Learned to program on a Cyber with strict ANSI Fortran 77. Extensive programming experience on the Mac in C (LightSpeed). Extensive programming experience with 4.3 BSD. No MacII experience (I think I saw a prototype once). Wrote a DA in TML Pascal once, then scrapped the code and rewrote everything using MDS. Have a vague idea of what MacApp is. Enough Assembler to write glue if I need it. I am pretty confident I could do the project in Lightspeed C according to the specifications, and using only the Macintosh native OS, assuming that LightSpeed works well on the MacII, doesn't crash too often, and produces workable code (68881 support?) I could also spring for a Fortran compiler, if there is a good one that supports the 68881 and the ToolBox. I KNOW I could do a bang-up job in Fortran. I am not at all well informed about the other options. I know what the physics at the base of the problem are, and have some idea of what the computing capabilities of the MacII, but I simply have no idea how well the tools offered work. Can anybody answer these questions? A/UX: Do I get "CC" and "F77"? If so, how good? Is this a stable OS? (Arrives in two weeks.) How good is ToolBox support? MacApp: Is it suited to a project of this type (heavy numerical analysis)? HyperCard: Would this be of any use? MPW: What will this do for me? I know csh, is it as good? (Csh is better than popup menus, as far as I am concerned!) How well do the "tools" it comes with work? (As well as the utilities that come with 4.3 BSD?) LightSpeed C: Is this good on a MacII? Fortran: Is there a zippy Fortran that works on the MacII? With my experience, is there something else I could buy that would work better than any of the above? ($500, tops, unless it is REALLY good, and EVERYBODY says to get it.) The machine and software are being shipped January 15, and the project is supposed to be COMPLETED July 31. I would love to use A/UX, but I plan to make heavy use of Mac things (windows, menus, controls) and I do not see myself as a beta-tester. I want to start off with a compiler that is at least as solid as LightSpeed C is on a Mac Plus, or as "CC" and "F77" are with UNIX. (You can make fun of F77 if you like, and you can deride weird UNIX shell syntax, but these things work on the machines I have used, and they work well.) Perhaps I can get enough advice from net-land to minimize the surprises after I open the box... What would you do? (Btw, I don't mean to imply that non-scientific stuff is not "serious", but each field does have its unique requirements...) -- ********************************************************************* *Earle R. Horton, H.B. 8000, Dartmouth College, Hanover, NH 03755 * *********************************************************************
jwhitnel@csi.UUCP (Jerry Whitnell) (01/09/88)
In article <7880@eleazar.Dartmouth.EDU> earleh@eleazar.Dartmouth.EDU (Earle R. Horton) writes: |HELP! | ... |I am pretty confident I could do the project in Lightspeed C according |to the specifications, and using only the Macintosh native OS, assuming |that LightSpeed works well on the MacII, doesn't crash too often, and |produces workable code (68881 support?) I could also spring for a |Fortran compiler, if there is a good one that supports the 68881 and the |ToolBox. I KNOW I could do a bang-up job in Fortran. I am not at all |well informed about the other options. I know what the physics at the |base of the problem are, and have some idea of what the computing |capabilities of the MacII, but I simply have no idea how well the tools |offered work. | |Can anybody answer these questions? | | MacApp: Is it suited to a project of this type (heavy numerical | analysis)? MacApp deals primarily with the user interface (menus, windows, printing, documents, etc.). If you've already developed your own set of tools to handle these, it won't do you much good. | HyperCard: Would this be of any use? Hypercard is primarily a simple database. Not much support for numerics. | LightSpeed C: Is this good on a MacII? The only thing better then LightspeedC on a Mac Plus is Lightspeed C on a Mac II with Multifinder. I've had no problems with it on my Mac II (40 MB hard disk with 5 mb of memory). Very fast, very bug free (except for stdio support, sigh). As far as I'm concerned, this is the only choice for single programmer projects. You will need the 2.13 upgrade (available from Think and recently sent over the net) to get the includes for IM 5 and Multifinder compatibility. The only thing wrong for your purpose is that it doesn't support 68881 directly but uses SANE to access it. This slows things down. I think the next version will fix that but I don't know when that will be available. You probably could do your development under Lightspeed C and rebuild the final version with MPW C (which I think has '881 support). For the best performance, use a large cache (I use 500 kbytes) to catch all the includes. You can also increase the size of the LightspeedC partition from the default 700K to about 2 mb. BTW, MultiFinder also comes free with the Mac II. | | With my experience, is there something else I could buy that would | work better than any of the above? ($500, tops, unless it is | REALLY good, and EVERYBODY says to get it.) If you plan to use color, you will want Inside Mac Volume 5 final draft (available only from APDA). If you don't have TMON, you should get that as well. The support for the Mac II isn't great, but it beats Macsbug. | |*Earle R. Horton, H.B. 8000, Dartmouth College, Hanover, NH 03755 *