Path: utzoo!utgpu!water!watmath!clyde!burl!codas!uflorida!gatech!mcnc!ece-csc!jnh
From: jnh@ece-csc.UUCP (Joseph Nathan Hall)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.mac
Subject: Re: Re: Pascal on Mac
Message-ID: <3453@ece-csc.UUCP>
Date: 17 Feb 88 20:23:39 GMT
References: <4860004@hpiacla.HP.COM> <6500019@hpindda.HP.COM>
Reply-To: jnh@ece-csc.UUCP (Joseph Nathan Hall)
Organization: North Carolina State University, Raleigh, NC
Lines: 49

*** EAT THIS ***

In reference to LSP's editor, it's, well, OK.  I personally think Lightspeed
Pascal is the language of choice on the Mac.  (Don't ask me why.  I generally
prefer "C.")  But the editor is aggravating at first.  Why?

1) The arrow keys don't work.  I loathe, repeat, *LOATHE* having to move
the cursor with the mouse.  Years of editing on "normal" editors and 80 wpm
typing skills make me strongly prefer moving a text cursor with keys, rather
than a mouse.

2) Auto-indent and auto-highlight ("pretty printing") is nice, I guess, but
the LSP editor doesn't use my preferred style of Pascal indentation.  I'm
used to interactive formatting from emacs et al., but LSP's editor doesn't
support any of the "Electric C - like" features that make emacs so much fun.
(Like showing matching parentheses and other delimiters, for example.)  You're
stuck, basically, with their non-tweakable, non-shutoffable pretty-printing 
editor, which would really piss me off if I didn't think that it was basically
OK, which I do.  But I can sympathize with anyone who doesn't like it.

3) Some other "features" of LSP also annoy me.  Restricting comments to one
line, I think, is stupid.  I'm not one to leave huge blocks of commented-out
code in my programs during development, but it's nice to have the option.
LSP doesn't let you use a) two separate styles of comment marker or b)
put comments inside lines either (it helpfully moves them to the end of
the line if you try).

Now that I think about it, another annoying "feature" of the pretty-printer
is that it enforces the "one statement per line" rule.  This isn't so bad
as long as you're concerned about violating the rule in the more-than-one-
statement-per-line direction.  But it's *extremely* annoying when you're
creating long statements and have to use horizontal scrolling to look at
them.  So annoying that I waste time trying to avoid creating long statements.
Why can't the editor let you break a statement into two or three or however
many lines?

However...

I still love LSP.  I'm sure it will improve.

I haven't seen or tried MPW Pascal, by the way.  Anyone who's used both
willing to offer a comparison?

-joseph
/*
 * What, me worry?  16 days till I get married and you want me to worry?
 */

*** EAT THIS ***