Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!lll-winken!lll-tis!ames!mailrus!tut.cis.ohio-state.edu!cwjcc!gatech!udel!princeton!mind!romero
From: romero@mind.UUCP (Antonio Romero)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.ibm.pc
Subject: Re: Windows for TurboC
Message-ID: <2863@mind.UUCP>
Date: 9 Sep 88 19:56:04 GMT
References: <646@oscvax.UUCP> <5082@netnews.upenn.edu>
Reply-To: romero@mind.UUCP (Antonio Romero)
Organization: Cognitive Science, Princeton University
Lines: 47

In article <646@oscvax.UUCP> scotte@oscvax.UUCP (Scotte Zinn) writes:
>I am looking for libraries (with source code hopefully) for a package that
>will make window handling with TurboC very easy.  

Joel Spolsky mentioned Vitamin C, so I thought I'd jump in.  I've had a fair
amount of first-hand experience, and I found Vitamin C to be a pretty
good package on the whole.  While there were numerous errors in the
documentation, and the documentation was kind of obscure in places, and
not too well organized, if you wanted to do anything other than what
the designers envisioned, the library itself has lots of nice stuff
like text windows with Wordstar-subset editing commands, a reasonable
system for menus, and a few other things.  

My main warning about the package is that they often screw up return
values for "failed" function calls-- the documentation may report
functions that return pointers, or -1 on failure, for example, which in
fact return a NULL.  If you see something like this in the documentation be
very suspicious.  Check the source code.

If you're ready to get your hands dirty and go grubbing through the source
code (included) then you can make it do some really nice things.  I had
occasion to develop most of a commercial product using Vitamin C, and
found the source pretty easy to understand, for the most part.
It was also generally pretty extensible-- if you didn't like some behavior,
you could fairly easily change it or extend it.  Once I got over my
initial resistance to poke through the source on my own and find what I
really wanted, I was pretty satisfied.  This seemed pretty true of most of 
the programmers using the package.

Joel originally said "beats MS Windows hands down;" my only response to this
is to say that they are two totally different products-- MS Windows providing
a full-blown graphical environment, while Vitamin C is only a text-based
windowing package.  But I will say that Vitamin C is probably much easier to
work with if all you're going to need is text windows.  Also, I'm sure it's
smaller, easier to work with and more flexible.

Source is included (or at most costs $100 or so extra) and you get unlimited
right to distribute things developed with Vitamin C.  You may have to
recompile the libraries with their compiler if yours isn't one that they
explicitly support, but this shouldn't be a problem.  Also, for Turbo C you
may want to go through the source and generate prototypes for all of the
functions, just for type-checking purposes-- it really helps.

While I wouldn't say, absolutely, this is the package to use,
I would consider it seriously if you're doing any kind of text-window
oriented programming, and you don't mind getting your hands a little dirty.

-Antonio Romero    romero@mind.princeton.edu