josh@dewey.soe.berkeley.edu (Josh Putnam) (01/03/90)
Why is PostScript the way it is? Why not use a lisp-like language? Is it because of the simple implementation? Does a postscript language make page description easier? Josh Putnam
woody@rpp386.cactus.org (Woodrow Baker) (01/03/90)
In article <33444@ucbvax.BERKELEY.EDU>, josh@dewey.soe.berkeley.edu (Josh Putnam) writes: > > Why is PostScript the way it is? Why not use a lisp-like language? > Is it because of the simple implementation? Does a postscript language > make page description easier? > > Josh Putnam A threaded style language, with a RPN structure is inherantly easier and faster to interpret. As for making page descriptions easier, it does not. Describing the page is a separate operation. What Postscript does is give you an incredably powerful programming language, and an imaging model that allows the RENDERING of the page to be size independant as well as sophisticated. Because you are essentially creating a program to image out a page, much of the work can be pushed off on the printer. The ability to scale and rotate images and text enables the RENDERING of the page to be more general and flexible than that of say a bit-mapped page. or even a fixed font size implementation. Cheers Woody
amanda@mermaid.intercon.com (Amanda Walker) (01/04/90)
In article <33444@ucbvax.BERKELEY.EDU>, josh@dewey.soe.berkeley.edu (Josh Putnam) writes: > Why is PostScript the way it is? Why not use a lisp-like language? > Is it because of the simple implementation? Does a postscript language > make page description easier? One thing that PostScript has over Lisp is that it's very easy to do a Forth-style threaded implementation. Lisp storage allocation in particular can be much more complex, and with only so much RAM to play with, a stack-based threaded language can give you more "bang for the buck". It's also marginally easier to generate from a program (unless that program is written in Lisp :-)), which is nice for things like output drivers, emulators, and so on. Does anyone know what ever happened to LispScript? It was a baby Lisp interpreter that compiled into normal PostScript. Amanda Walker InterCon Systems Corporation --