sharvy@reed.UUCP (Harvey Marvy) (11/30/90)
Let's pretend you just got a new se-30 with 5 megs of ram and a big fat hard you-know-what. Let's also pretend that you know a lot about BASIC (and will admit it) a moderate amount about Pascal, and a minor amount about C. So you're a "language-sensitive" guy not fluent in any "real" languages, and you want to buy one (1) for your new Mac, grow with it, and cherish it forever. But of course, there's all these different versions of these different versions--Think (and is this different from Think Lightspeed?) Turbo, etc., plus this Modula stuff which keeps getting bigger. What would you get? In short, which single programming package would all you macho pros out there get if you could start all over again and get THE best, purest, simplest, easiest, neatest, modernest, language for your Mac? Let's also pretend that no question like this has ever been posted to this group before. (I'm new here, but I bet it's a common topic.) Thanks, Ben.
Chris.Gehlker@p12.f56.n114.z1.fidonet.org (Chris Gehlker) (12/03/90)
> Let's pretend you just got a new se-30 with 5 megs of ram and a big fat hard > you-know-what. Let's also pretend that you know a lot about BASIC (and will > admit it) a moderate amount about Pascal, and a minor amount about C. So > you're a "language-sensitive" guy not fluent in any "real" languages, and you > want to buy one (1) for your new Mac, grow with it, and cherish it forever. > > But of course, there's all these different versions of these different > versions--Think (and is this different from Think Lightspeed?) Turbo, etc., > plus this Modula stuff which keeps getting bigger. What would you get? In > short, which single programming package would all you macho pros out there get > if you could start all over again and get THE best, purest, simplest, easiest, > neatest, modernest, language for your Mac? Let me start out by admitting that my approach to Mac Development systems is "buy em all" and that if I absolutely had to live with just one it would be a hard choice between MPW C++ and MPW Assembler. Having said that, I would definately go out and get THINK Pascal as my first language. It's fast, easy to learn and produces good code. It's also relatively cheap, and comes with a nice debugger. The story with the names goes like this. There once was a company named "THINK Technologies" that had two products; LightSpeed Pascal and LightSpeed C. These products acquired the abreviations LSP and LSC on better networks around the world. In the fullness of time this company was bought by Symantic and became a division of it's parent. After a few bad starts such as "Symantic's THINK LightSpeed Pascal" the parent company decided that the names THINK Pascal and THINK C would best preserve the good will that their aquisition had built up. The only problem with Symantic's choice of names was that the initials TC and TP were already in wide use for Borland's Turbo C and Pascal respectively. So people contine to use LSP to refer to THINK Pascal and LSC to refer to THINK C. -- Uucp: ...{gatech,ames,rutgers}!ncar!asuvax!stjhmc!56.12!Chris.Gehlker Internet: Chris.Gehlker@p12.f56.n114.z1.fidonet.org