Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!wuarchive!swbatl!texbell!ficc!peter From: peter@ficc.ferranti.com (Peter da Silva) Newsgroups: comp.arch Subject: Re: Re^2: Macintosh OS Message-ID: Date: 7 Jun 90 14:50:19 GMT References: <402@newave.UUCP> <3300131@m.cs.uiuc.edu> <5031@quanta.eng.ohio-state.edu> <1990May28.083518.26003@laguna.ccsf.caltech.edu> <54992@microsoft.UUCP> <12189@cbmvax.commodore.com> <355@three.MV.COM> Reply-To: peter@ficc.ferranti.com (Peter da Silva) Organization: Xenix Support, FICC Lines: 20 In article <355@three.MV.COM> cory@three.MV.COM (Cory Kempf) writes: > A properly written user oriented program would check for events frequently, ^^^^^^^^^^^^^ > even in the middle of a heavy duty CPU burst. That is just good user > oriented development though. Remember: The USER is in control. On the Mac, all programs are basically editors. This is not always the best way to design a program. For example, the aforementioned ray-tracer. To put it another way, what about non-user-oriented programs? Even programs with an extensive user-interface may contain some computationally intensive code. Spreadsheets, for example. Haicalc, on the Amiga, is implemented as a compute engine and a set of user-interface tasks: each window actually being managed by a separate process. When you change a cell, this is communicated to the compute engine which takes appropriate action. The user process continues to run. Any changes are broadcast to each user-interface task concerned. The UI tasks are user-driven. The compute task is written for speed. You just can't build an application like this on the Mac. -- `-_-' Peter da Silva. +1 713 274 5180. 'U` Have you hugged your wolf today? @FIN Dirty words: Zhghnyyl erphefvir vayvar shapgvbaf.