Re: Programming the IIgs

[dempson@actrix.gen.nz (David Empson)]

In article <hochstrasse-2207961300180001@artemis.bothebel.unibas.ch>,
hochstrasse@ubaclu.unibas.ch (Urs Hochstrasser) wrote:

>The disadvantages of C? Well all the code examples in the Toolbox manuals
>are in Pascal...

No they aren't.  They are all in C.

The majority of Inside Macintosh is written with Pascal examples and call
definitions, but the IIgs toolbox reference manuals only show assembly
language and C calling conventions (there was no IIgs Pascal compiler
available when TB Ref 1 and 2 were written, and there are quite a few
toolbox calls that simply cannot be called from Pascal, because they
require weird operations like returning a record from a function, which is
not supported by most Pascal compilers).


In my case, I learned Pascal (1981), BASIC (1982), 6502 machine code
(1982), assembly language (1983), (s)Logo (1984), then C (1986).

I certainly appreciated learning Pascal first (learning all the structure
rules, and having the compiler insisting that I do it right), but I can
hardly stand using it now because it is so restrictive and verbose (I much
prefer C, with occasional bursts of assembly where required).

I've tried using Modula II, which is basically Pascal on steroids, with
even more infuriating syntax rules, such as insisting that all the
reserved words be entered in upper case.  As you can probably tell, I
can't stand it. :-)

-- 
David Empson
dempson@actrix.gen.nz
Snail Mail: P.O. Box 27-103, Wellington, NEW ZEALAND