Path: utzoo!mnetor!uunet!lll-winken!lll-tis!ames!ll-xn!mit-eddie!uw-beaver!cornell!batcomputer!itsgw!imagine!pawl2.pawl.rpi.edu!jesup
From: jesup@pawl2.pawl.rpi.edu (Randell E. Jesup)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.amiga
Subject: Re: Time is of the essence on IPC.
Message-ID: <656@imagine.PAWL.RPI.EDU>
Date: 13 Apr 88 06:27:27 GMT
References: <1571@louie.udel.EDU> <353@brambo.UUCP> <1661@louie.udel.EDU> <48285@sun.uucp> <1814@sugar.UUCP>
Sender: news@imagine.PAWL.RPI.EDU
Reply-To: jesup@pawl2.pawl.rpi.edu (Randell E. Jesup)
Organization: RPI Public Access Workstation Lab - Troy, NY
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In article <1814@sugar.UUCP> peter@sugar.UUCP (Peter da Silva) writes:
>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.

	It's fairly obvious that you're still looking at Arexx as only a
dataswitch.  Acting as a dataswitch for Arexx is like driving a Ferrari in
first gear: sure, you can do 60+, but what about the other 4 gears?

>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.

	Remember, one of the major users of Rexx in the IBM world is by
secretaries, many of whom are programming-illiterate, and quite a few
computer-barely-literate.  It was designed to be simple for non-computer
people to use.  For example, the original Rexx book says that easy-to-remember
constants should be chosen for limits, like 100 or 500 or 20, instead of
128 or 1024 or 31 or 511, so that a non-computer person can remember them.

     //	Randell Jesup			      Lunge Software Development
    //	Dedicated Amiga Programmer            13 Frear Ave, Troy, NY 12180
 \\//	beowulf!lunge!jesup@steinmetz.UUCP    (518) 272-2942
  \/    (uunet!steinmetz!beowulf!lunge!jesup) BIX: rjesup
(-: The Few, The Proud, The Architects of the RPM40 40MIPS CMOS Micro :-)