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From: darin@nova.laic.uucp (Darin Johnson)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.amiga
Subject: Re: Learning C on the Amiga --- A Survey
Keywords: survey, C, Amiga
Message-ID: <631@laic.UUCP>
Date: 25 Jul 89 01:03:12 GMT
References: <15255@watdragon.waterloo.edu> <644@godot.psc.edu> <2170@spudge.UUCP>
Sender: news@laic.UUCP
Reply-To: darin@nova.UUCP (Darin Johnson)
Distribution: comp
Organization: Lockheed AI Center, Menlo Park
Lines: 44

In article <2170@spudge.UUCP> johnm@spudge.UUCP (John Munsch) writes:
>I think one of the most helpful things for people who are trying to program
>the Amiga, whether they know C or not, would be a set of shell programs that
>demonstrate all of the basic functions of a complete Amiga program.

Yes, this is a good idea.  Now that I know my way around the Amiga,
I can generally find samples for what I want to do.  But for the first
few months, I was pretty lost.

I thought about writing some sample shells, but I always see something
that does it better than I would have (plus it takes a lot of time).

For the simplest case, I have seen a shell that opens a window and
waits for it to close.  Problem is, for more complex examples, there
is a lot of code for all the different things you want to do.  Then
when someone writes a shell, it gets shoved off by itself, unrelated
to any other shells out there.

Perhaps the best way to go would be to have a "project name" and a
group of programmers to manage all of this, similar to ARP.  There
would be no one programmer and some actual coordination.  As a big
plus, whenever you wanted to help a novice learn to program the Amiga,
you would say "get Fish disk xx, it has the latest up-to-date Project
Foo skeleton code on it", instead of "get Fish disks a, b, c, d, e,
and then when you're done with that, there are some samples on disks
x, y, z."  I wouldn't mind working on such a project, but like most
people, I don't want to coordinate it.

On a related topic, it would be nice to have a sample library of
common routines, time-saver's, etc.  I have started building a binder
with stuff useful to me (scavanged from various PD programs,
libraries, etc.).  This wouldn't be an Amiga library, but just a
collection of C, Assem, and Modula II files.  Stuff it should have in
it would be: CloseWindowsSafely, dosalloc, playsound, lock2path, etc.
(It may have something like stricmp(), but should not have every
incarnation of str routines)

Put these two ideas together and there could probably be 1 or 2 disks
worth of useful stuff.  (kind of wonder what some of these top-gun
programmers would have come up with if they had such a resource when
they were learning Amiga...)

Darin Johnson (leadsv!laic!darin@pyramid.pyramid.com)
	We now return you to your regularly scheduled program.