Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!mcvax!ukc!strath-cs!glasgow!orr
From: orr@cs.glasgow.ac.uk (Fraser Orr)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.postscript
Subject: Re: An Idea to Help Make Postscript Easier to Read (and Write)
Message-ID: <1613@crete.cs.glasgow.ac.uk>
Date: 7 Sep 88 10:37:29 GMT
References: <940@helios.ee.lbl.gov> <943@helios.ee.lbl.gov>
Reply-To: orr@cs.glasgow.ac.uk (Fraser Orr)
Organization: Comp Sci, Glasgow Univ, Scotland
Lines: 37

In article <943@helios.ee.lbl.gov> mccanne@helios.ee.lbl.gov (Steve McCanne) writes:
>In article <940@helios.ee.lbl.gov> forrest@ux1.lbl.gov (Jon Forrest) writes:
>>What about a "compiler" that converts standard postscript into
>>what I'll call infix/function form? In otherwords, the output would
>
>Van Jacobson thought this was a good idea as well.  He developed a language
>called "PreScript" that is a lot like C, and compiles into PostScript.
>I helped with the implementation; it should be out for beta testing very 
>soon, if not already.  Look for it in comp.sources.misc.
>

I too have written such a program, and used it quite extensively. (I'm using
NeWS rather than postscript, but the problems are essentially the same.)
I have found it more than a little benificial. 

Someone said that they had started doing this but had come to the conclusion 
that they would be better just hacking postscript. In my experience this is not
true. Even if you just hack yacc parser to give you infix and prefix notation
for arithmetic operators, control structs and function calls the difference in
readability and writability is quite amazing. I wrote such a parser in a couple
of hours (and saved weeks of work therby.)

If you add things like auto creation of local vars, named params, multiple 
assignment etc etc ad infinitum then postscript would become a positively 
appealing language to program in.

(By the way, for those of you who are interested in the merits and demerits
of the compiler approach, there is a discussion going on about this very subject
in comp.lang.forth)

I look forward with anticipation to the posting of PreScript.

Regards,

==Fraser Orr ( Dept C.S., Univ. Glasgow, Glasgow, G12 8QQ, UK)
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