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Re: PP Lament Results
Ken O Burtch (ken@tiamet.uucp) wrote:
[long post; possibly longer reply]
: 1. It's too expensive.
Put simply, precompilers, no matter how many whiz-bang options
they have, are going to cost more and take longer to compile than
actual code-generating compilers. Your program is $50 or so? Add the
cost of ORCA/Pascal ($80 maybe?), and you have the cost of ORCA/C
plus the Learn to Program in C package, which I boug some year and half
ago with _no_ knowledge of C and went on to develop pretty cool
applications which I'll later be able to port easily to most any
platform. Can you honestly say that your language has the portability
of C? I highly doubt that.
: 2. Never heard of it / Try to promote it more
I hadn't heard of it until your usenet posts, so I guess this
reason is quite valid.
: 3. I prefer (or have to) work in another language.
: Again, lots of reasons. Novice programmers don't want to learn
: anything more complicated than BASIC (and I don't blame them).
: Some people use C at work, and want to use C at home. Still
: others said that nobody is making new software, so why does
: anyone need to buy/learn a new, if more powerful, language?
I was a novice programmer two years or so ago. I learned C
as my first language. It wasn't at all difficult. What you're saying
isn't true. Quite frankly, I doubt that your language is more powerful
than C. I've done enough programming in C to know that I've barely
scratched the surface in terms of flexibility and coding style.
: Let's see. Basketball was invented in Canada. Then there's hockey,
: and the last two World Series, of course. Then what about John
: Candy, Bill Murray, Lorne Greene, and that funny fellow hanging around
: the alien girls -- ah, yes, Shatner. The way I see it, Hawaii will
: make a nice province. You've got too many stars on your flag anyway!:)
Let's not start a US vs Canada flame war. Besides, when it comes
down to it, we've done more and we both know it =)
: c. There aren't that many IIgs programmers anymore. (Kenrick Mock)
: Well, this is probably the most important point of all. If PP was
: going to be used, it would have to be adopted by the majority, and
: it doesn't look like that's going to happen. This is sad news for
: IIgs users who are still waiting for new software.
This is true, but the few remaining programmers have been quite
productive without your superlanguage. Why should this change?
: g. Why learn an oddball language when the IIgs isn't forever? (D. Empson)
: I added the cross-compiling features to compensate for the "oddball"-
: ness of the language. Just because you write a program in Pegasus
: Pascal doesn't mean that you're software is orphaned on the IIgs.
: Programmers who are afraid of the shrinking IIgs market can develop
: a program and then cross-compile it for another machine.
I'm not sure what you mean by this; if you mean developing DOS/
UNIX/etc projects on your IIgs, that's one of the silliest ideas I've
ever heard. Besides, since your language is a precompiler, isn't this just
dumping out Pascal sources and let Turbo Pascal or whatever compile it?
: Obviously the toolbox calls don't get compiled into BIOS equivalents,
: but careful planning can keep the platform dependant stuff to a minimum
: (as I did with Treasures from Heaven, where I kept IIgs-specific stuff
: in certain files).
BTW, Treasures From Heaven is _not_ a game I'd like demonstrating
the power of my language. It had the slowest, most flickery animation
combined with a totally repugnant user interface in addition to taking
a sickening amount of disk space for such small results. Sorry to be so
cutting, but this game is one of the things that turned me off to
Pegasus Pascal in the first place.
: If you point is that UNIX-like shells like ORCA and GNO are obsolete,
: I won't argue with you either: I was surprised that only one person
: wished there was a integrated desktop environment for PP. I actually
: have a skeleton version up and running (ie. TML-type environment with
: TextEdit windows, jump to location of errors, and a special "project"
: window similar to THINK Pascal). But after the responses I've received,
: I'll have to throw that on the Vapourware pile--too much work if nobody
: wants a new language in the first place.
Not at all. UNIX-like shells like GNO (ORCA is in no way unixlike)
are powerful, flexible development platforms. Mainstream programmers
almost always develop under text based shells as opposed to slow, crashy
graphical interfaces like ORCA's prizm.
: Well, I wish I could help--I don't own GNO, but I've written to
: Procyon (sp?) repeatedly, and they've ignored me. As much as I
: would like to make it GNO compatible, I can't very well buy GNO/ME
: just to do that. As you said, I, too, have spent "far too much
: money on the IIgs and am choosing carefully what gets bought from
: now on."
Email bazyar@netcom.com. Maybe it's that notoriously lacking
Canadian Postal Service ;)
: I hope they've just been too busy to reply and aren't doing
: something like developing their own compiler and are jealous of
: competition -- there just isn't enough IIgs market to have it
: broken apart like that. Everybody suffers.
Believe me, this isn't the case.
: So why aren't IIgs applications written in Applesoft?
: Inertia is no excuse: is anyone really comfortable grappling around
: with curly brackets in C, or having typos taken as legitimate
: commands?
AppleSoft is not C. Within C, you can access 90% of the IIgs's
resources, and add inline assembly to access the other 10%. Curly
brackets are the most elegant form of command nesting I've ever come
in contact with, but if you enjoy those classy PROCEDURE..END statements,
you can #define BEGIN { if you so desire. Can your language (beer) do this?
--
Dave J. Roberts [daver on IRC - #appleiigs] /|
daver@drift.winternet.com / |urora
UNIX C & Apple IIgs C/65816 Programmer /___ | Software