Path: utzoo!utgpu!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!rpi!usc!wuarchive!psuvax1!news From: melling@cs.psu.edu (Michael D Mellinger) Newsgroups: comp.sys.amiga.advocacy Subject: Re: NeXT/Amiga Flamage: Get a life. Message-ID: Date: 9 Apr 91 01:18:04 GMT References: <46867@ut-emx.uucp> <1991Apr8.222503.23643@mintaka.lcs.mit.edu> <295@atacama.cs.utexas.edu> Sender: news@cs.psu.edu (Usenet) Organization: Penn State Computer Science Lines: 31 In-Reply-To: jonabbey@cs.utexas.edu's message of 9 Apr 91 00:59:00 GMT Nntp-Posting-Host: sunws5.sys.cs.psu.edu In article <295@atacama.cs.utexas.edu> jonabbey@cs.utexas.edu (Jonathan David Abbey) writes: This is beginning to become annoying. Display PostScript need not at all be slow. Yes, Display PostScript is interpreted, but that doesn't imply that it need be slow. PostScript is a very simple language, involving only hashed token look-up and stack pushing/popping. The actual rendering functions could very well be in optimized '030 assembler for all I know. Display PostScript may actually even provide for a binary equivalent to common PostScript tokens, which could overcome much of the size bloat of regular PostScript. The only times in which DP would be so terribly complex would be those times that the Amiga rendering functions would be rather inadequate for the task. The benefits include a much higher level of device independence and an easier time at software development time. (Would you rather write a desktop publishing program for the Amiga or NeXT? Which would take longer? Which would have greater potentials for errors?) There is in fact a binary form for Display Postscript. The program pswrap is a preprocessor that converts Postscript to this form. Also, Postscript can be generate in Objective C by using C function equivalents to Postscript operators. For example, PSsetgray(0); PSmoveto(50, 50); PSrlineto(100, 100); PSstroke(); The binary form in probably more efficient, but this works for a lot of the programming that I do. -Mike