Path: utzoo!utgpu!water!watmath!clyde!rutgers!cmcl2!husc6!mailrus!umix!uunet!mcvax!ukc!mupsy!mucs!wm
From: wm@mucs.UX.CS.MAN.AC.UK ( "temporary login")
Newsgroups: comp.windows.misc
Subject: Re: Why I'm suspicious of NeWS
Keywords: NeWS
Message-ID: <3199@mucs.UX.CS.MAN.AC.UK>
Date: 18 Feb 88 18:02:16 GMT
References: <2940@bloom-beacon.MIT.EDU> <3851@megaron.arizona.edu> <2945@bloom-beacon.MIT.EDU>
Reply-To: wm@mucs.UUCP (Wm Leler)
Organization: Computer Science, University of Manchester, UK
Lines: 23

In article <2945@bloom-beacon.MIT.EDU> wesommer@athena.mit.edu
(William Sommerfeld) writes:

>NeWS programming requires you to know two radically different
>languages (extended PostScript and, presumably, C) and switch between
>them quickly; X only requires one (for now, C or Common Lisp; ... 

Just because PostScript went to the trouble to include useful things
like control structures, doesn't mean that it is any harder to learn
and understand than a large set of C function calls (the X library,
toolkit, etc.).

Remember, a language is just a set of conventions for communication.
The interface to a library is certainly such a language.  Indeed, a
good case can be made that an extensible, complete language (such as
PostScript) is easier to learn than a set of subroutine calls, since
desired operations can be built up from a smaller set of primitive
operations (an example of this would be some arbitrary dashed line,
which might not be provided in a library of dashed lines, but which
could always be coded up using an iterator in a complete language).

Wm Leler
The PIX Project