Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!cs.utexas.edu!sun-barr!olivea!orc!inews!iwarp.intel.com!gargoyle!chinet!patrickd From: patrickd@chinet.chi.il.us (Patrick Deupree) Newsgroups: comp.windows.ms Subject: Re: Actor 3.0 Message-ID: <1990Oct21.042713.12776@chinet.chi.il.us> Date: 21 Oct 90 04:27:13 GMT References: <1990Oct12.222349.9097@mentor.com> <1413@msa3b.UUCP> Organization: Chinet - Chicago Public Access UNIX Lines: 73 In article <1413@msa3b.UUCP> kevin@msa3b.UUCP (Kevin P. Kleinfelter) writes: >* No screen painter. The salesthing said it has one. The only one I can > find is a dialog editor, and the Windows SDK provides one already. That's interesting. I don't remember any of their sales literature having a reference to a screen painter. Maybe the Resource Toolkit. >* The "wordAt" function does not behave as documented. This function > supposedly provides access to data located at any address. If it is > passed an address outside of the data area for the executing program, > it hangs the system. (Probably a Windows 386 mode restriction, but > there is no mention of this in the doc.) Hmm. I know I've used this function a bit and it worked for me. However, I do know of a few customers that did have some trouble, though it mostly seemed to deal with getting data that wasn't really at that address. >* Setting "NMIBreak=1" in WIN.INI does NOT enable Ctrl-Alt-SysRq > to trap to the debugger. It is documented to do so. This was due to some stupidity in the art of communications. I'm afraid that the Ctrl-Alt_SysRq feature used one of the interrupt vectors. Unfortunatly, when running Windows 3.0 in enhanced mode, this doesn't work because you can't reset interrupt vectors (from a high level program). I even told the testing department this, but it didn't seem to reach documentation. >* Error messages are terrible. For example, loading a DLL, where > a function referenced in Actor is not in the DLL produces the > message "Can't convert to Windows short argument". I have to defend them here and say that the error messages in any development system I've used are pretty bad. I've seen systems where every error says "segmentation fault" and I've seen others that tell you an error is in one place when it's actually 400 lines up. >* No support for any DBMS; we would have to write it. And you probably won't see any for quite a while. This is another topic that I got on their case about and nobody seemed to listen. Too bad for them. >* Not possible to switch Actor to another project/program without > restarting Actor. I can't support this as a "complaint" really. You can't switch to another project easily, but you can switch. However, I did find myself with quite a few "Fred" icons since I had 5 projects going on at once usually. >* One must copy ACTOR.EXE and ACTOR.IMA from a backup copy in order > to get back to a "clean" environment. Actually, it's only the Actor.ima that you have to copy. Actor.exe will only get messed up if your disk has a problem. If you want to strip out extra resources that you've added just use the actor.rc file to reset it. Actor certainly does have its problems, but it's great for students that want a cheap system for Windows development and for commercial developers/ corporations that want a quick, but complete system as Actor will cut development time in half. However, if you want database support and a screen painter, I'd look at Object/1. If they havn't released the Windows 3.0 version yet, they should be doing so soon. I'd also recommend looking into SmallTalkV/PM as it should be out in December. If they follow suit with previous versions, you should be able to compile SmallTalk programs into binary, native code (e.g. fast and efficient). Patrick Deupree DKW Systems Corporation -- "What's in a name? That which we call a rose by any other name would smell as sweet." William Shakespeare Patrick Deupree -> patrickd@chinet.chi.il.us (708) 328-3800 (Please note there are both a patrick and a patrickd at this site)