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Path: utzoo!linus!decvax!harpo!seismo!rlgvax!cvl!umcp-cs!chris
From: chris@umcp-cs.UUCP
Newsgroups: net.cog-eng
Subject: Re: User-Friendly Re-Defined Access-Efficient
Message-ID: <2259@umcp-cs.UUCP>
Date: Tue, 30-Aug-83 22:27:23 EDT
Article-I.D.: umcp-cs.2259
Posted: Tue Aug 30 22:27:23 1983
Date-Received: Thu, 1-Sep-83 04:04:55 EDT
References: ulysses.579, <976@ittvax.UUCP>
Organization: Univ. of Maryland, Computer Science Dept.
Lines: 38


	From: wex@ittvax.UUCP (Alan Wexelblat)

	I think Gary Perelman has an excellent set of ideas, but
	I see two problems with his multi-functional schema:

	1) Cost in programmer time.  There are an awful lot of
	"hooks" involved in writing code with pop-up menus and
	many-layered HELP systems.

That's what libraries are good for!  (What else would the author
of the Maryland window library say?)  With some reasonable
datastructures, pop-up menus and such are actually quite simple
once someone's done the work once.  Jim Lyle has written a menu
package that sits on top of my windows; it does most anything a
programmer might want to do with menus, including side-by-side
display, "masked select", . . .  Now, we haven't even started
working on "novice/expert/casual_user" systems here, though.

	2) Cost in machine space/time. . . .  Heck, our VAX
	experiences significant slowdown in the presence of three
	or four TROFF jobs!

True, although your example isn't a particularly good one.  TROFF
leans heavily on the time side of the time/space tradeoff.  There
are *so* many things in there I wanted to rewrite, when I realized
what they were doing!  (A quick profile showed that for an 80K
document, one routine was called over 300,000 times!  I quickly
made a macro for the push-back character part of that.)

In short (one sentence short), yes, you have a point, but I think
we've already got the machine- and software-tool power to make building
easy-to-use systems easy.

-- 
In-Real-Life: Chris Torek, Univ of MD Comp Sci
UUCP:	{seismo,allegra,brl-bmd}!umcp-cs!chris
CSNet:	chris@umcp-cs		ARPA:	chris.umcp-cs@UDel-Relay