Path: utzoo!utgpu!water!watmath!clyde!att!rutgers!rochester!cornell!batcomputer!itsgw!steinmetz!uunet!portal!cup.portal.com!doug-merritt
From: doug-merritt@cup.portal.com
Newsgroups: comp.sys.amiga
Subject: Re: More DMouse 1.03 bugs
Message-ID: <6058@cup.portal.com>
Date: 30 May 88 05:17:26 GMT
References: <1781@van-bc.UUCP>
Organization: The Portal System (TM)
Lines: 53
XPortal-User-Id: 1.1001.4407

Larry Phillips writes:
>[I] have seen very little of CX. All I ever saw was a 'proposal' sort of thing
>that described the Commodities Exchange, without going into a lot of
>detail, and without any binaries/source/whatever.

CX was distributed on Fish disk 87, both documentation and binaries.
It was also locally distributed by Jimm at a BADGE meeting.

>Yes, ARexx is a $50
>package, and yes, not everyone has it, but to many people, right now, it is
>a lot more available than CX, and is getting ever increasing support from
>developers. Looking at it another way, would you consider $50 to be an
>outrageous price for a fine quality tool?

That's not the point at all. For one thing, *both* are available, and
CX is free. For another thing, it is wholly intended to be used to
do input handlers in a clean way. Therefore I was saying that if you
want to do input handlers, CX is the right way. Using AREXX for an
input handler just doesn't make any sense at all.

>  Perhaps I am remembering the one article I read on CX badly, but I didn't
>think it was any more than an arbiter of hotkey combinations? Is there
>more? If so, please tell me more about it.

The whole problem is that it isn't well understood. Half the point of
my comments was to remind people that it existed, and to generate some
interest in programmers using it. It's *beautifully* designed and
executed, and it's the perfect tool *for programmers* to use for input
handlers. I'm not prepared to define its scope, but it's quite powerful.

Bringing up AREXX in this context is about as irrelevent as if I
started talking about using Basic...there's simply no connection whatsoever.

>Sounds to me like Peter got caught up in the simplicity and power of
>ARexx, and passed on some of that enthusiasm.

Understandable, yet illogical in this context.

One thing I talked about may be especially unclear: the idea of
creating a "script language" for CX. I didn't think this out in much
detail before saying something, so my comments may have been misleading.
The idea was just to make CX available to more casual use than the
current audience of systems programmers. Upon reflection, it seems
to me that this "script language" might actually be a C-code program
generator (although in a trivial sense).

Anyway, to follow up on this point, it'd be a good idea to check
out CX on Fish 87 first. I need to re-read the docs myself.
	Doug
--
      Doug Merritt        ucbvax!sun.com!cup.portal.com!doug-merritt
                      or  ucbvax!eris!doug (doug@eris.berkeley.edu)
                      or  ucbvax!unisoft!certes!doug