Path: utzoo!mnetor!uunet!husc6!think!ames!ptsfa!ihnp4!alberta!calgary!gaines
From: gaines@calgary.UUCP (Brian Gaines)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.mac
Subject: Re: Pascal on Mac
Message-ID: <1366@vaxb.calgary.UUCP>
Date: 19 Feb 88 21:14:57 GMT
References: <4860004@hpiacla.HP.COM> <6500019@hpindda.HP.COM>
Organization: U. of Calgary, Calgary, Ab.
Lines: 42
Summary: LSP Editor

In article <6500019@hpindda.HP.COM>, atchison@hpindda.HP.COM (Lee Atchison) writes:
> / hpindda:comp.sys.mac / drc@dbase.UUCP (Dennis Cohen) / 11:44 am  Feb 13, 1988 /
> >comes out way ahead because you don't need to deal with that (expletive-deleted)
> >editor in LSP.
> 
> I've heard this comment a number of times.  Having only used Turbo Pascal,
> (which also has an integrated editor), what is wrong with the LSP editor?
LSP Editor reformats your source file in its own 'prettyprint' format
and you cannot prevent this.  For those who have programmed in Pascal
for years and have their own style it is quite unusable.  It is not a
matter of 'taste' as Andrew says, but a matter of arrogance, of imposing
a source format style upon the user who has very good reasons for
preferring their own.  Otherwise it is a very nice compiler with an
excellent symbolic debug and automatic 'make' facility which are valuable
and not available in Turbo.  LSP have probably lost many potential
customers through their editor - they may have gained others!
> 
> I happen to like the Turbo Pascal editor, is the LSP editor as good as/worse
> than/better than this?
The Turbo editor is simple but effective with a good standard Mac user
interface.  It does not attempt any 'intelligent(?)' formatting of
your source files.  The MPW editor is similar but more powerful because
of the MPW shell facilities in which it is embedded.

It is easy to write large systems that migrate between all three compilers
provide you do not use any of their idiosynchratic features (eg '+'
for string concatenation in Turbo) and look out for minor semantic
inconsistencies (eg 'Copy' in MPW returns a null string if you ask for
more characters than the original string whereas most Pascals return
the original string.  I have not used TML Pascal for a while but had
no difficulty migrating some large programs from it to Turbo when Turbo
came out.

It would be useful to get a definitive list of the differences between
these compilers as many programmers will need to move source between them
from time to time.  I would be happy to collect those people have found
if they mail direct to me, and then post the collection.

Brian Gaines, gaines@calgary.cdn (403) 220 5901
Department of Computer Science, University of Calgary, Calgary,
Alberta, Canada T2N 1N4
>