Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!cornell!uw-beaver!uw-june!roper
From: roper@june.cs.washington.edu (Michael Roper)
Newsgroups: comp.windows.ms
Subject: Re: Debugging Windows
Message-ID: <8850@june.cs.washington.edu>
Date: 30 Jul 89 00:52:50 GMT
References: <30097@ucbvax.BERKELEY.EDU> <106580054@hpcvlx.HP.COM> <3239@rtech.rtech.com>
Organization: U of Washington, Computer Science, Seattle
Lines: 34

[I asked for an example of why one would be forced to write code 
that was video device-specific.]

Mark Hanner writes:

> Certainly once you get [the mapping modes] set up and parameterize 
> all your code, you have a nice virtual device interface, but its 
> more code you have to write where bugs can develop. 

> It is also  all too easy to hack in hard codings that work fine on 
> a 640x450 but produce unpredictable results on 800x600 and forget 
> about them. 

This again, is a different issue.  The point here seems to be that
writing parameterized code is harder than writing single-case code 
or that writing poor code is easier than writing good code.  Obviously, 
you'll not find many that disagree.  However, your original assertion 
was that one was -forced- to write different code for different 
displays.  I still haven't seen an example of this.  Which is not 
to say there aren't some, there are.  But I don't believe it is a 
damning problem (and will be improved in 3.0).

The gist I get from your remarks is that Windows is a complex platform
for which it is hard to write and debug applications.  No question
about it, it's true.  But when you say that you can't write a Windows
application to run on any system that Windows runs on, without writing
a lot of device- and machine-dependent code, I disagree.  Note that
I am not saying that the platform does not have bugs which may 
occasionally require a work-around.  But it hardly seems reasonable,
for example, to claim that Windows is not machine-independent because 
someone wrote a Windows driver with a bug.

Michael Roper
hDC Computer Corp.