peter@aucs.UUCP (08/17/87)
Its been almost two years since I've done any programming on the Mac,
and I want to get back to it. I now own a Mac SE, but all my documentation
is out of date (never had a lot to start with). What are the current best
sources of literature for programming the Mac (Titles and publishers)?
What (in your opinion) is the best environment for programming the
Macintosh. I own Lightspeed C 1.0, Aztec C (it supports HFS), and Megamax
C (ugh!). Which one should I upgrade, or is there something better?
I have just purchased TMON as well.
Your advice and comments would be appreciated. Mail to me if the
mailer lets you; I'll summarize for the net if the info seems
useful.
Peter W. Steele UUCP : {uunet|watmath|utai|garfield}!dalcs!aucs!Peter
Acadia University BITNET : Peter@Acadia
Wolfville, N.S. Internet : Peter%Acadia.BITNET@WISCVM.WISC.EDU
Canada B0P 1X0 PHONEnet : (902) 542-2201x121mentat@auscso.UUCP (Robert Dorsett) (08/21/87)
In article <410@aucs.UUCP> peter@aucs.UUCP (Peter Steele) writes: >Its been almost two years since I've done any programming on the Mac, >and I want to get back to it. I now own a Mac SE, but all my documentation >is out of date (never had a lot to start with). What are the current best >sources of literature for programming the Mac (Titles and publishers)? >What (in your opinion) is the best environment for programming the >Macintosh. I own Lightspeed C 1.0, Aztec C (it supports HFS), and Megamax >C (ugh!). Which one should I upgrade, or is there something better? >I have just purchased TMON as well. I've had the opportunity to use Lisa Pascal, Turbo Pascal, and Megamax C. In my humble opinion, Turbo Pascal is the best all-around general programming language for the Mac. Has near-100% Lisa Pascal compatibility (just need to change the compiler directives), and is NEARLY bug-free. It is VERY fast. We're talking one-second compilation times for "Hello, world"-type programs, maybe 15 seconds for a 2000-line program. It is an excellent learning en- vironment, largely due to its speed. While it doesn't have the sachharine hand-holding of Mac Pascal, it WILL point out the line with the bug. Next in line comes Lightspeed C. I am CONSIDERING transferring a large program to it from Megamax, but have yet to here from the net on lower- case identifier mods. -> If the first message got munged, I need to know if Lightspeed can be modified to accept lower-case Toolbox identifiers. For example, "moveto" instead of "MoveTo". Lightspeed has an exceptional process tracking mechanism. It is well suited for large, multi-file development projects. I haven't had a chance to evaluate its performance, but the benchmarks look impressive. Its compiler is as fast off a disk as Megamax C on a RAMdisk. I believe that Lightspeed would be best used off a hard disk. It definitely requires a MacPlus. Last in line is Megamax C. While it's a pretty nice implementation, it's starting to show its age. It's very awkward to keep track of large projects. One nice thing about it is that it gives the user the option of configuring the system for all-lower-case or mixed-case operation, as well as some nice utilities (batch processing (unnecessary in Lightspeed), a disassembler, in-line assembly, code profiling, etc). -- Robert Dorsett {allegra,seismo}!sally!ngp!walt!mentat University of Texas at Austin {allegra,seismo}!sally!ngp!mentat mentat@ausco.UUCP