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From: ali@navajo.STANFORD.EDU (Ali Ozer)
Newsgroups: net.micro.mac,net.micro.amiga
Subject: Comparing the Mac and the Amiga
Message-ID: <837@navajo.STANFORD.EDU>
Date: Tue, 16-Sep-86 03:08:16 EDT
Article-I.D.: navajo.837
Posted: Tue Sep 16 03:08:16 1986
Date-Received: Tue, 16-Sep-86 20:16:38 EDT
References: <1273@jade.BERKELEY.EDU> <1274@jade.BERKELEY.EDU>
Reply-To: ali@navajo.UUCP (Ali Ozer)
Organization: Stanford University
Lines: 72
Xref: mnetor net.micro.mac:7008 net.micro.amiga:4682

In article oster@lapis.berkeley.edu.UUCP (David Phillip Oster) writes:
>I am not a great amiga expert, but the mac has some definate advantages
>for the programmer in certain areas:
>  Text handling - when the mac was released, they gave me a one page
>  pascal program that implemented a mouse based text editor with cut, 
>  copy, and paste.  I sincerely doubt you could do as much on the amiga as
>  concisely.
>
>  Sound - recently net.micro.amiga had a note from R.J.Micah, one of the
>  designers of the Amiga's software, giving three pages of C code to do
>  what a mac programmer does as "SysBeep(1)"  Most amiga programmers use
>  the equivalent of MacInTalk to make their machine say "Beep" because it
>  is too hard to get a tone out of it.

Hmm, Pascal on the Mac is more like Basic on the Amiga than like C on the
Amiga. AmigaBasic is a wonderful language that lets you do truly
neat things with one or two statements. You can trace, open windows,
Beep as much as you like, cut/paste, etc... So you shouldn't be comparing
Mac Pascal to Amiga C, you should be comparing Mac Pascal to AmigaBasic.
Using C on the Amiga, you can make the hardware do things a Mac (or even
a Mac owner) can't even dream of... But if you wanted to create useless 
little cut/paste text editors, I'm sure it could be done with AmigaBasic
as easily as it could be done with Pascal on the Mac.

Amiga is a much more powerful machine than the Mac. Any Mac owner
doubting that should find someone who owns an Amiga and have them 
demonstrate Marble Madness and Mind Walker. Then they should also see 
how Amiga programmers can use Emacs and C concurrently, and even read 
news on the net while the compiler is running in the background. For
kicks, you should also see how Amiga programmers can have Musicraft playing
their favorite tunes in the background while they are working on their C
programs. 

>  Resources - The Mac has a what-you-see-is-what-you-get editor called
>  the resource editor that allows you to change menus, fonts, icons, and
>  every detail of alerts and dialogs (requestors on the Amiga) without 
>  ever recompiling.  An amiga programmer must laborously speel out these
>  things in C code that does not look at all like the finished product.

Unfortunately Mac "what you see is what you get things" are not ALWAYS
"what you see is what you get". Just last week I was using MacDraw 
and could not get my bold face courier fonts (that looked columnized 
on the screen and acted columnized) print columnized on the LaserWriter.
Unless "what you see is what you get" works all the time, then it's
worthless. 

>  safety - the amiga crashes if you draw a line that extends outside the
>  screen.  (According to a friend who regularly crashes his amiga this
>  way.)  The mac graphics system calls, although they aren't very safe,
>  are safer than this!

That is how real programmers like it! Come on, I would hate to have 
the OS spend half its time checking my parameters when I'm trying to 
run 300x200 life on the at 20 generations/sec. (By the way, add
Tom Rokicki's LIFE game, written in less than 3 days, to the above list
of things to see on an Amiga.) 

>  ...  The Amiga's operating system is written in
>  BCPL.  BCPL is a ancient British language that was directly responsible
>  for the birth of C.  The designers of C started out in BCPL and
>  concluded that it was not possible to make a BCPL compiler that
>  generated decent code for a byte addressable machine. 

Hmmm, I've yet to meet this BCPL, I wonder where it is hiding in my machine?
I have an OS that I can use from C, what does it matter how it was written?
What was the Mac operating system written in, C? Or PASCAL? Probably 68000.

>--- David Phillip Oster		-- "The goal of Computer Science is to
>Arpa: oster@lapis.berkeley.edu  -- build something that will last at
>Uucp: ucbvax!ucblapis!oster     -- least until we've finished building it."

Ali Ozer, Ali@score.stanford.edu