Path: utzoo!mnetor!uunet!seismo!sundc!pitstop!sun!pepper!cmcmanis
From: cmcmanis%pepper@Sun.COM (Chuck McManis)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.amiga
Subject: Re: Time is of the essence on IPC.
Message-ID: <49063@sun.uucp>
Date: 11 Apr 88 18:33:40 GMT
References: <1571@louie.udel.EDU> <353@brambo.UUCP> <1661@louie.udel.EDU> <48285@sun.uucp> <1814@sugar.UUCP>
Sender: news@sun.uucp
Reply-To: cmcmanis@sun.UUCP (Chuck McManis)
Organization: Sun Microsystems, Mountain View
Lines: 48

In article <1814@sugar.UUCP> peter@sugar.UUCP (Peter da Silva) writes:
[I'll assume for the moment that y'all are following this and it can be
edited liberally :-)]

>How many programs out there *don't* know how to use the filesystem?

Well, take any program that speaks IFF to files. To correctly write
IFF files you have to be able to seek back to the front of the file
to store lengths and such. Not to useful with a pipe. 

>But filesystem semantics are sufficient for *most* of the things people
>want to do. What they're not sufficient for is hard real-time stuff
>like (say) SMUS players or MIDI drivers. And even there the problem isn't
>the filesystem semantics, it's the filesystem speed.

I disagree, but this is probably a religious issue and not worth the 
bandwidth debating. If you are going to be at the DevCon we can pick
it up there. 
[I wrote :]
  "I think aREXX is a good stab at that more powerful facility."

>When I get my next royalty check I'll check it out.
>
>One problem with AREXX that nobody's really addressed yet is that it's not
>going to be usable by novices... people for whom the CLI is terra incognito.
>One outcome of this process should be something that can be used to sell
>Amigas to normal people.

Here your ignorance is showing. I can understand your dislike of ARexx 
because it is not free, and I have no problem with that, but before you
go off an make blanket statements like the one above I suggest you
evaluate the product. I upgraded to TxED plus which comes with a 'demo'
version of the Rexx server. TxED uses ARexx to implement macros and such.
What is nice is that using these macros are just as easy as using macros
in MaxiPlan or something, no excursion to the CLI is necessary, no novice
hostile features at all. If you support ARexx in your program it *is*
transparent to "normal people" they just think "Wow, what a great macro
lanugage this product has."

With ARexx and a slideshow program that has an ARexx port, one can 
produce an instant titling program. My favorite is going to be after
I have XLisp modified to support ARexx, combined with MicroEMACS you
suddenly have *real* emacs with a Lisp interpreter and everything.


--Chuck McManis
uucp: {anywhere}!sun!cmcmanis   BIX: cmcmanis  ARPAnet: cmcmanis@sun.com
These opinions are my own and no one elses, but you knew that didn't you.