Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!decwrl!ucbvax!ucsd!orion.oac.uci.edu!rbarris
From: rbarris@orion.oac.uci.edu (Robert C. Barris)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.mac.programmer
Subject: Re: THINK C Suggestions
Message-ID: <26F588C3.24428@orion.oac.uci.edu>
Date: 18 Sep 90 02:38:59 GMT
References: <695@sun13.scri.fsu.edu> <26218@cs.yale.edu>
Reply-To: rbarris@orion.oac.uci.edu (Robert C. Barris)
Organization: University of California, Irvine
Lines: 37

I have some ideas as well, for anyone who cares:
     1. The speed of the editor I found to be surprising compared
        to QUED, MPW, and Alpha, especially when just scrolling by
        using the down-arrow. It was really slow! The interesting thing
        was that using the arrows in the scroll-bar improved the scrolling
        speed somewhat. Also, holding down one of the shift keys and
        then scrolling with the down arrow (creating a big selection as a
        side effect) actually went faster than scrolling by arrow key alone!

     2. I wouldn't mind the editor sluggishness so much if I could just get
        the compiler/make system to always keep an eye on the disk files
        and check modify dates and times. It's a real pain to have to
        edit a lot of stuff with QUED and then have to go through the whole
        "Make... Check Disk... (whir) Go" dialog to get it to recompile th
        stuff I changed. If the make facility was a little more open minded
        about alternative editors, this would be really easy.
         (of course, how would it then point to your error for you when it
          finds one? Would this be a real use of AppleEvents someday?)

     3. Borland Turbo Debugger does a good job of working backwards from
        values in variables and displaying them as appropriate enums, or, in
        the case of pointers to functions, actually telling you the name
        of the function pointed to (as best it can). I really wish
        Think C could do that. Value of var Color is "BLUE"!

     4. How hard is it to use an MMU to implement hardware breakpoints like
        on the 386? Apple mentioned some tool that would do something along
        these lines back at the 1988 Developer's Conference and I haven'
        seen or heard since. Perhaps SADE can do this?
        Turbo Debugger can do this and it is the ultimate lifesaver. "Tell
        me when this byte gets written with this value..."

     5. I don't have version 4.0 yet, so maybe they already did this.
        "Tile Windows". MPW and QUED can both do it with a single keystroke
        and it saves a lot of time futzing with window layouts when you're
        looking at 5 things at once
- Rob