Re: MS-DOS FST? => Resources

[vandry@CAM.ORG (Phillip Vandry)]

johnmac@fawlty.towers.oz.au (John MacLean) writes:

>Unfortunately, the implementation Apple chose (ie: splitting a file into
>two forks) sucks badly, IMHO.

See, I'm not alone :)

>It required adding a vast array of support at the operating system level,
>and makes Apple's proprietory file systems very difficult to map to any
>other file systems (such as MSDOS, UNIX, etc).

Exactly. A simple solution would be to make dynamic OMF segments a little
easier to work with. IMO, the only adavantage (ONLY!) of resources is that
they can be purged from memory if required. Dynamic segments have this
functionality. Plus they can do everything else resources do - without
hacking up the file system.

On the other hand, I've always found it convenient to have data
completely seperate from code - in sepearate files. That makes customization
much easier. Don't like the program's title page? delete the file
Title.Page and put your own SHR picture in its place.

>Why couldn't they just define a file format for executeables that allowed

Like I said, they didn't need to define an executable format, there are
dynamic load segments! (although optimization would be in order)

Also, look at everything that had to be changed to accomodate resources.
All the tools had to be rewritten to support them. The operating
system had to be rewritten.

It may be easy for the programmer to use resources: just use, for example,
NewWindow2 instead of NewWindow. But if there had been no resources,
tons of routines like NewWindow2 wouldn't need to exist. I'm sure
resources support code accouts for a considerable fraction of toolbox code.

Anyway, so those are some of my reasons for not liking resources. Expressing
my reasons is better than simply saying rez is bad, I guess
 ______________________________________________________________________
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| Phillip Vandry | Vandry@Cam.Org | Suicide (n.): What to do if Macs   |
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