Re: Postscript emulation

[lockwood@ecs.csun.edu (James Lockwood)]

I normally shy away from contradicting someone obviously well informed in
the Apple // scene, but I just have to toss in some facts here (which are
sadly lacking).

Nathan Mates (nathan@visi.com) wrote:

>    I don't think there's a port of it for the GS, even with GNO/ME,
> and the simplest reason is the following 3 letters: GNU. Ghostscript
> is a GNU program, which means that source code is freely available,
> yadda yadda yah. The problem is that the source code is (1) usually
> incomprehensible, and (2) assumes all sorts of things about your
> system, such as (A) memory limits essentially don't exist (i.e. lots
> of swap space available), (B) stack space limits don't exist, (C) all
> ints are 32 bits, and pointers and integers are interchangeable, (D)
> you're running on a unix workstation. Most to all of these conditions
> are not valid on the GS.

>    Ghostscript *may* be a nicely written GNU program, but by their
> track record, I'd doubt it. [There's also the consideration that
> postscript uses a lot of floating point #s when rasterizing, which'd
> be glacial on most GSs] 

First of all:  the GNU license is a license applied to software by authors.
There is no magic "GNU" group that develops software, what you are thinking
of here is the FSF (Free Software Foundation).  Note that the majority of
GNU licensed code out there is _not_ written by the FSF, but by independant
programmers.  There is no "they" to refer to when talking about GNU licensed
software.

Ghostscript is commercially developed product by Aladdin Enterprises, who
graciously freely release source code to older versions of their product as
they develop newer ones.  Their code is first rate, and their intentions
towards the free software industry have fathered a large amount of goodwill.
I can think of very few companies out there with such a liberal policy.

True, they assume 32-bit (or larger) ints, and true, it would probably be
unbearably slow on a IIgs (even an accelerated one).  But there's no need
to denigrate the coding quality of a product you admit you haven't even
read.

No well written Unix code assumes that pointers and ints are the same size,
as such code breaks instantly on systems such as the DEC Alpha (64-bit
pointers, 32-bit ints).  Ghostscript certainly doesn't.  99% of the FSF
software doesn't.

-James

=============================================================================
James D. Lockwood                 College of Engineering and Computer Science
Unix System Administrator              California State University Northridge
james.lockwood@ecs.csun.edu