Path: utzoo!mnetor!uunet!nuchat!peter
From: peter@nuchat.UUCP (Peter da Silva)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.amiga
Subject: Re: Feeping Creaturism
Message-ID: <732@nuchat.UUCP>
Date: 5 Mar 88 01:17:11 GMT
References: <8802181921.AA19069@cory.Berkeley.EDU> <682@sandino.quintus.UUCP> <5295@utah-cs.UUCP>
Organization: Public Access - Houston, Tx
Lines: 50

In article <5295@utah-cs.UUCP>, thomson@utah-cs.UUCP (Richard A Thomson) writes:
> In article <700@nuchat.UUCP> peter@nuchat.UUCP (Peter da Silva) writes:
> >In article <682@sandino.quintus.UUCP>, pds@quintus.UUCP (Peter Schachte) writes:
> >Look at the way the Mac is isolated in its
> >own pretty little room by its programming model. A large part of this is
> >due to the fact that source code on this baby includes a weird proprietary
> >chunk of data called the resource fork. The last thing the Amiga needs is
> >to duplicate more of the negative aspects of the Mac.

> What's really so wrong with it?  Is source code transfer your
> problem?

My problem is that what people do on the Mac is pretty much irrelevent to
what people do on every other computer in the world, and vice versa. The
two main reasons are that a program on the Mac has to be written essentially
as a device driver, and that it's not even entirely examinable unless you
have another Mac... because the resource fork contains information that is
integral to dealing with the file but which is unintelligable even when
it's available to people on other machines.

For example, if I write a well-behaved program on the Amiga to generate
sucessive generations of an artificial organism for playing with the idea
of evolution, someone on an IBM-PC could take that program and adapt it for
their machine simply by stripping out the Intuition stuff and putting in
IBM stuff. Similarly I can port Emacs from UNIX to the Amiga, as a well-
behaved application, simply by writing the screen-display code and compiling
the rest.

A well-behaved Mac application has a number of attributes that make this hard:

It has to call the operating system at least once every 100 milliseconds to
maintain desk accessories.

It has to be built around an "event loop" that handles all events in the system,
and passes down to other programs the ones it's not interested in.

It has to allow for arbitrary relocation of large parts of its data as the
system collects garbage.

It has to use the resource fork for text messages and displays... so unless
you have the resource fork in a human-readable form you can't even tell what
the program's supposed to say.

The idea of porting a Mac program to anything else, or porting anyone else's
programs to the Mac, is pretty much a fantasy. Unless you write a badly-behaved
Mac program or use A/UX.
-- 
-- a clone of Peter (have you hugged your wolf today) da Silva  `-_-'
-- normally  ...!hoptoad!academ!uhnix1!sugar!peter                U
-- Disclaimer: These aren't mere opinions... these are *values*.