Path: utzoo!utgpu!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!cs.utexas.edu!swrinde!elroy.jpl.nasa.gov!sdd.hp.com!hplabs!otter.hpl.hp.com!otter!adw
From: adw@otter.hpl.hp.com (Dave Wells)
Newsgroups: comp.windows.ms
Subject: Re: SDK vs Actor 3.0
Message-ID: <10960019@otter.hpl.hp.com>
Date: 1 Mar 91 13:01:51 GMT
References: <1991Feb27.173751.2152@beau.adp.wisc.edu>
Organization: Hewlett-Packard Laboratories, Bristol, UK.
Lines: 41

From: kwong@polyslo.CalPoly.EDU (Ka Chin Wong)

>By all means choose Actor.  An excellent object oriented programming
>language.  With Actor, you don't need SDK to build Windows application.
>You learn Actor and at the same time you learn OOP.

Be warned - although you don't *need* the SDK to program with ACTOR (3.0),
it is very advisable to own and be familiar with the SDK documentation.
In principle, you could use the most basic Windows facilites (menus, dialog
boxes, etc., from ACTOR without knowing SDK. The ACTOR equivalents are,
however, sparsely documented or not documented at all. (For example,
Window:changeMenu()). You need to look up the calls that such ACTOR methods
make to Windows to be able to use them. Many of the SDK facilities
(bitmaps, etc.) are not supported by ACTOR at all. (It's easy enough to
call the relevant Windows functions from ACTOR, but not without the SDK
manuals!)

>In a way, Actor is very similar to Smalltalk (Programming Environment).
>Actually, it is like a combination of LISP, Smalltalk, C, and Pascal,
>but with a simple, power (and at the same time easy to read) syntax.

Yes, ACTOR seems to be SmallTalk 72 (language and environment) with the
language syntax shuffled a bit. As such, it inherits many of the problems
of SmallTalk which SmallTalk 80 was designed to overcome. In addition, it
lacks the SmallTalk MVC paradigm (*) for designing the user interface, and
doesn't put anything in its place. To me, this is an extremely serious
omission, and leads inevitably to messy, unstructured applications.

Moreover, the documentation on the ACTOR kernel calls is thin or
nonexistent (compared to the SDK reference manual, say). If you're the sort
of person who's happy to find out what an ACTOR call does by reading the
code, trying it out, and then concluding "this seems to work, so it must be
OK", you'll find this quite acceptable. As you can probably tell, it makes
me annoyed and frustrated, especially as the SDK itself demonstrates a much
higher standard of documentation.

Dave Wells

Disclaimer: these are my views, not those of Hewlett Packard.

(*) Model-Pane-Dispatcher is the SmallTalk V equivalent.