Path: utzoo!attcan!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!iuvax!purdue!bu-cs!dartvax!eleazar.dartmouth.edu!ari
From: ari@eleazar.dartmouth.edu (Ari Halberstadt)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.mac.programmer
Subject: Re: simple text interface [+ little bit of flame]
Message-ID: <14780@dartvax.Dartmouth.EDU>
Date: 2 Aug 89 01:50:38 GMT
References: <9674@phoenix.Princeton.EDU> <43528@bbn.COM> <9676@phoenix.Princeton.EDU> <8299@boring.cwi.nl>
Sender: news@dartvax.Dartmouth.EDU
Reply-To: ari@eleazar.dartmouth.edu (Ari Halberstadt)
Organization: Dartmouth College, Hanover, NH
Lines: 47

People have been answering that you have to rewrite TextEdit with some
strange routines to get a command line interface. This is true, but
they've obviously never used LSC, since the people at THINK tech already
wrote such a standard screen package, for implementing printf. They
provide the source code for the stdio package, so that you can modify it,
something I did.

Now, for the flame part. The apple interface is truly lousy for certain
things. I'm not a novice apple user; I've been using mac for several years,
and have become proficient in programming them. But at one point, I really
needed a command line interface. I'm also proficient in UNIX,
and one of my main gripes about apple is the lack of any useful tools, and
any normal way to integrate them. On UNIX, I can accomplish in 10 minutes
what could take me several hours on a mac [consider awk as just one example].
I won't go into the details here, since that would take too long.

When I finally decided to write a command line interface, I realized
it also needed a dialog interface, or in other words, a Graphical User
Interface. This idea has been buzzing around in my head for about 5 years,
ever since I got seriously into UNIX. Unfortunately, I was not in a position
to implement such an idea, and the world has had to wait quite a while
for popular versions of such interfaces :-). Yes, I know I'm not the only
one who thought of it, but it really seems to have taken many major
companies quite a while to figure it out.

So, without ever having seen MPW, I set about writing a command line
interface along with dialogs to implement each command, and on-line help,
interactive help [ok, help was in the design, but I haven't yet implemented it].
I did this because I needed to cut development time of software to a minimum:
I couldn't afford to build software from scratch with whole new windows
menus, dialogs etc. I had to write things like sed and an indexer inorder
to produce books, and a useful, quick, and cheap, copy/backup utility. I also
wrote dialog interfaces for these commands.

So, now I've got this big chunk of code, but, being a single hacker,
I can't possibly compete with apple's resources, and whoever makes
MPW. Besides, I wrote my program as a private project, not for
someone who was paying me. Working now with MPW, I'm amazed at the
design and implementation errors that its creators made! I'm amassing
a list of complaints which I shall eventually mail off to its creators.
Besides, version 3 is damn full of BUGS! It's hanging for no good
reason, quite often too. I've even found one completely reproducible
bug, which I shall also mail to MPW's creators [hey, you guys reading this?]

-- Ari Halberstadt '91, "Long live succinct signatures"
E-mail: ari@eleazar.dartmouth.edu	Telephone: (603)640-5687
Mailing address: HB1128, Dartmouth College, Hanover NH 03755