Path: utzoo!attcan!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!tut.cis.ohio-state.edu!ucbvax!hoptoad!tim
From: tim@hoptoad.uucp (Tim Maroney)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.mac.programmer
Subject: 32-bit OS (was: Re: Wide offscreen bitmap won't receive draw commands)
Message-ID: <8352@hoptoad.uucp>
Date: 21 Aug 89 18:07:32 GMT
References: <22321@andante.UUCP> <1989Aug19.221033.2241@geology.wisc.edu>
Reply-To: tim@hoptoad.UUCP (Tim Maroney)
Organization: Eclectic Software, San Francisco
Lines: 37

In article <1989Aug19.221033.2241@geology.wisc.edu> jct@paz.UUCP (John C.
Terranova) writes:
>Looks to me like it is time for rowBytes to be a 32 bit LongInt.

That's for sure!  *Everything* should be a longword, in fact.  For most
real applications, 32 bits is the same as unlimited, while 16 bits is
equivalent to a limit you will meet very quickly.  The use of 16-bit
integers throughout the MacOS is one of the most pervasive design flaws
in the system.  Yes, yes, I know all about data bus sizes and
efficiency, but efficiency takes second rank behind *possibility*.
It's better to be able to do a wide range of things with a slight
performance penalty than to do a narrow range of things a bit faster.

Want to display a bitmap or picture with more than 32,767 pixels in a
scrolling window?  Better write your own scroll bar CDEF then, and set
up your own versions of the value etc. routines, because the Control
Manager can't imagine you would ever want a 32-bit control.  Same goes
for text -- want to display more than 32,767 lines in a scrolling text
document?  Don't look to the OS for help, except for drawing the
characters!

Admittedly, there are not all that many two megabyte text files running
around, though this is not out of the question for a book.  However,
graphics files (especially TIFF files) with that many pixels resulting
from multiple pages are not at all uncommon.  I don't believe that it
would really have hurt the user-visible performance of the Control
Manager to use 32-bit values, and just as with TextEdit, this stupid
limitation makes me wonder if the writers really expected the Control
Manager to be used anywhere but inside dialogs.
-- 
Tim Maroney, Mac Software Consultant, sun!hoptoad!tim, tim@toad.com

"Do what you wanna, do what you will;
 Just don't mess up your neighbor's thrill.
 And when you pay the bill, kindly leave a little tip
 To help the next poor sucker on his one-way trip."
    - Frank Zappa, "You Are What You Is"