Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!wuarchive!rex!rouge!cacs.usl.edu
From: pcb@cacs.usl.edu (Peter C. Bahrs)
Newsgroups: comp.windows.ms
Subject: Re: Actor 3.0
Message-ID: <16477@rouge.usl.edu>
Date: 13 Oct 90 06:56:23 GMT
Sender: anon@rouge.usl.edu
Organization: The Center for Advanced Computer Studies, USL
Lines: 50




>From: plogan@mentor.com (Patrick Logan)
>
>I'd appreciate receiving bits of history and words of advice wrt
>Actor, particularly Actor 3.0. What problems/limits have you run into.
>What are the great things about it. Etc.
>
>Note: I'm asking about the product Actor from The Whitewater Group,
>not the actor language research at MIT!
>

I don't think the name similarity is by accident.  

I like Actor and the philosophy for OO design and programming.  The
documentation is very good and the base system is very powerful.
You are presented with an interactive development and debugging
environment.  You can easily change methods and code and quickly
rerun them.  

Each application will produce and prog.exe and a prog.ima file.  Both
must be present to run these standalone and they are about 250k
I think.  This seems kind of clumsy.  I suspect one module is a 
binary encoding of the program and the other is an interpreter that
reads the binary encoding (ima) file and calls sdk type calls.

I have rewritten several base classes to closely reflect the new features
in win 3.0 such as track menus.  There is a debuggin anomoly in actor
though.  If you app barfs on something the debugger pops (another
application).  This does not step-lock your program though and it
will still try to process window manager messages such as PAINT.
If your PAINT routine uses values that were bad, BOOM. bye bye actor.
(Try just hitting return on the barchart demo without entering values
for numbers.  Then move the debugger when it comes up !)

I understand why this happens and there are two solutions
  1) Do value checks on your variables (of course)
  2) Redo some internal's such as the way the debugger reacts with
     your application.  This is what I am about to finish.  
     Basically, your app freezes until the debugger sayso on.

hhhhhuuuuu.  well there is also the graphics classes which I can't
(do not want to) afford yet.  

I have been using Actor for 2 months solid.  I have a 30000 line SDK and C
application and I am evaluating the ability to perform the same tasks
in Actor.

Peter