Path: utzoo!utgpu!water!watmath!clyde!bellcore!faline!ulysses!allegra!princeton!udel!rochester!PT.CS.CMU.EDU!andrew.cmu.edu!rs4u+
From: rs4u+@andrew.cmu.edu.UUCP
Newsgroups: comp.sys.mac
Subject: Re: LightSpeed C gripes
Message-ID: <4Vw68Uy00WAK1w00G4@andrew.cmu.edu>
Date: 17 Jan 88 07:11:28 GMT
Organization: Carnegie Mellon University
Lines: 43
Posted: Sun Jan 17 02:11:28 1988
In-Reply-To: <10928@duke.cs.duke.edu>


This is in response to your varied and miscellaneous gripes about LightspeedC. 
Before I begin responding to your specific complaints, first allow me to say 
that I am a user of LightspeedC (and to a much greater extent its sister 
product Lightspeed Pascal). It is not a perfect application. It comes damn 
close, but it's not perfect. But I have *never* seen a perfect application, on 
*any* computer.

You say that it "is one of the poorest products [you] have ever seen for a 
computer." But by comparison to what? The least you can do is tell us what 
you're used to. Or what you've found to be better.

One caveat: A main reason that I am defending LightspeedC is because I like 
the program. It is a fact (know my most of the readers of this news group) 
that I worked for THINK Technologies (the producers of LightspeedC). But I am 
answering this message as a satisfied owner and user of LightspeedC. Whether 
the reader believes this or not is of little consequence to me. I simply am 
relating the facts as they are.

Now, in response to your numbered points:

1a) "The documentation is awful." 
	The function of a program's documentation is to tell you how to use the 
program. For a programming environment, you need to know the basics: how to 
use the editor, how to use the compiler, how to use the linker, and so forth. 
I've been a user of LightspeedC since I first took up the C language, and I 
found the manual well geared towards someone who didn't know how to use the 
package. The manual does assume a certain basic amount of Macintosh knowledge, 
and a certain amount of C knowledge, but this is stated in the manual's 
introduction.

	Also, it's worth noting that Macintosh documentation is more sparse than PC 
(or other) documentation, because there's less to learn.

	An important part of using any programming language system is knowing the 
language you're trying to program in.

1b) "The library reference is incomplete, and doesn't say little things like 
which headers & libraries you must include."

	Horsefeathers. Chapter 13 of the User's Guide gives (on each page) a library 
function, along with a prototype of the function's declaration, and #include 
directives for the necessary include files.