KPURCELL@LIVERPOOL.AC.UK (09/11/90)
There was a recent letter in MacWorld complementing the new version of CompileIt! 1.5. Is anybody using it? Is it useful? How much more so that C or Pascal? When does it win over writing an XCMD in C/Pascal? Anybody using WindowIt! How useful do you find it? Kevin Purcell | kpurcell@liverpool.ac.uk Surface Science Centre | Liverpool University | Omit needless words.
jamesth@microsoft.UUCP (James THIELE) (09/13/90)
In article <90254.173048KPURCELL@LIVERPOOL.AC.UK> KPURCELL@LIVERPOOL.AC.UK writes: >There was a recent letter in MacWorld complementing the new version of >CompileIt! 1.5. > >Is anybody using it? Is it useful? How much more so that C or Pascal? What I'd like to know is whether 1.5 is faster than 1.0 (1.1?). My buddy bought it, used it to speed up a few time critical functions, but rarely drags it out 'cause it is S-----L----O----W. Typical speed is less than 1 line per minute on a Mac II (68020) machine. I didn't even want to think about what the rate would have been on my old Mac Plus. It would also reject some valid HyperTalk, and debugging was painful with 20 minute turnaround on 20 line functions. >Kevin Purcell | kpurcell@liverpool.ac.uk >Surface Science Centre | >Liverpool University | Omit needless words. James Thiele -- microsoft!jamesth
krona@nada.kth.se (Kjell Krona) (09/15/90)
I have been using CompileIt! 1.5 for a couple of months, and I have to agree about the slow compilation times. This would be acceptable if all HyperTalk code could be reliable translated, but as pointed out this is not always so. A few weeks ago I came across an astonishing bug: In an "if" statement, a ">" (I think) comparison reliable turned out an erroneus result; however, if I subtracted the values and compared to 0, it worked as expected! Of course, either way worked in HyperCard. This took me about half a day to figure out, thinking something was wrong with the parameter passing; you do not expect such a "simple" fault.. However, if the time of the script is critical - and it often is, HC 2.0 notwithstanding - it is still much faster than writing an XCMD or XFCN from scratch. It would certainly be nice if it was faster and more reliable, but I still think it is well worth its price for any serious hyperCard programmer. (I would like to add that the bug described above has only surfaced on one occassion, and I have not had the time to check if it is reproducible in every script. I was quite fed up at the time -:)) Kjell Krona krona@nada.kth.se Dept. of Architecture/Dept. of Numerical Analysis and Computer Science S-100 44 Stockholm, Sweden