ari@eleazar.dartmouth.edu (Ari Halberstadt) (08/02/89)
People have been answering that you have to rewrite TextEdit with some strange routines to get a command line interface. This is true, but they've obviously never used LSC, since the people at THINK tech already wrote such a standard screen package, for implementing printf. They provide the source code for the stdio package, so that you can modify it, something I did. Now, for the flame part. The apple interface is truly lousy for certain things. I'm not a novice apple user; I've been using mac for several years, and have become proficient in programming them. But at one point, I really needed a command line interface. I'm also proficient in UNIX, and one of my main gripes about apple is the lack of any useful tools, and any normal way to integrate them. On UNIX, I can accomplish in 10 minutes what could take me several hours on a mac [consider awk as just one example]. I won't go into the details here, since that would take too long. When I finally decided to write a command line interface, I realized it also needed a dialog interface, or in other words, a Graphical User Interface. This idea has been buzzing around in my head for about 5 years, ever since I got seriously into UNIX. Unfortunately, I was not in a position to implement such an idea, and the world has had to wait quite a while for popular versions of such interfaces :-). Yes, I know I'm not the only one who thought of it, but it really seems to have taken many major companies quite a while to figure it out. So, without ever having seen MPW, I set about writing a command line interface along with dialogs to implement each command, and on-line help, interactive help [ok, help was in the design, but I haven't yet implemented it]. I did this because I needed to cut development time of software to a minimum: I couldn't afford to build software from scratch with whole new windows menus, dialogs etc. I had to write things like sed and an indexer inorder to produce books, and a useful, quick, and cheap, copy/backup utility. I also wrote dialog interfaces for these commands. So, now I've got this big chunk of code, but, being a single hacker, I can't possibly compete with apple's resources, and whoever makes MPW. Besides, I wrote my program as a private project, not for someone who was paying me. Working now with MPW, I'm amazed at the design and implementation errors that its creators made! I'm amassing a list of complaints which I shall eventually mail off to its creators. Besides, version 3 is damn full of BUGS! It's hanging for no good reason, quite often too. I've even found one completely reproducible bug, which I shall also mail to MPW's creators [hey, you guys reading this?] -- Ari Halberstadt '91, "Long live succinct signatures" E-mail: ari@eleazar.dartmouth.edu Telephone: (603)640-5687 Mailing address: HB1128, Dartmouth College, Hanover NH 03755
afoster@ogccse.ogc.edu (Allan Foster) (08/07/89)
In article <14780@dartvax.Dartmouth.EDU> ari@eleazar.dartmouth.edu (Ari Halberstadt) writes: >People have been answering that you have to rewrite TextEdit with some >[...] >So, now I've got this big chunk of code, but, being a single hacker, >I can't possibly compete with apple's resources, and whoever makes >MPW. Besides, I wrote my program as a private project, not for >someone who was paying me. Working now with MPW, I'm amazed at the >design and implementation errors that its creators made! I'm amassing >a list of complaints which I shall eventually mail off to its creators. >Besides, version 3 is damn full of BUGS! It's hanging for no good >reason, quite often too. I've even found one completely reproducible >bug, which I shall also mail to MPW's creators [hey, you guys reading this?] > Well OK. I would be interested in discussing the errors made in the implementation. Design errors are subjective and open for interpretation. I would indeed have liked the escape chars in MPW to be closer to those in UNIX but I can live with them as they are. I use MPW on a daily basis and is running on my machine most all day. I have never had it hang on me , except one time when I was doing a link and one of the dumb virus utilities got in the way! Once I trashed that there was no problem. I have tak3en UNIX utilities and ported them to run under MPW in under half an hour. The exact case in point is a C format utility that needed only the addition of the spinning cursor to make it really MPW friendy. It ran first compile by the way. So as far as getting awk, sed and grep running, My Mac Programmers WORKSHOP has all of those utils available as well as YACC and LEX, in the form of Bison and Flex. I agree with the need for a command line interface and MPW seems to suit my needs for one. Regards All Foster MicroPhone II Development Team -- Allan Foster UUCP : tektronix!ogcvax!afoster UseNet: afoster@cse.ogc.edu GEnie : A.FOSTER AppleLink : D1663 MacNet : FOSTER