Path: utzoo!utgpu!watmath!clyde!att!osu-cis!tut.cis.ohio-state.edu!cwjcc!mailrus!cornell!lauri
From: lauri@svax.cs.cornell.edu (Georges Lauri)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.mac
Subject: Acknowledge (was Re: RedRyder Question)
Message-ID: <23387@cornell.UUCP>
Date: 12 Dec 88 17:41:40 GMT
References: <423@motbos.UUCP> <1254@cps3xx.UUCP> <211@bridge2.3Com.Com> <40@microsoft.UUCP> <885@esquire.UUCP>
Sender: nobody@cornell.UUCP
Reply-To: lauri@svax.cs.cornell.edu (Georges Lauri)
Organization: Cornell Univ. CS Dept, Ithaca NY
Lines: 19

My esperience with Acknowledge has been more on the hegative side.
I bought the product because I do a lot of telecom with Europe
and wanted to automate a lot of it. Acknowledge is really just an interpreter;
it comes with a set of demo "Communication Programs" that do things
like BBS, terminal emulation, etc... The first problem I discovered
were bugs in their programs, which are supposed to be usable as is.
Since source code is delivered, it was not too hard to fix them, although
their communication language is a monstrosity of ugliness (unless
you like basic). The second problem was that their file transfer is limited
in terms of protocols (only xmodem) and flaky.  The third problem is that
modifying the provided applications to say, suit my modem setup 
was extremely frustrating because all their programs are written 
in the worst of spaghetti code.
So while the idea of Acknowledge is good, I found the implementation to
be sorely lacking in power, flexibility, and cleanliness of
organization.  It does the job, but slowly, buggily, and I am not
using it for the purpose I intended.
						Georges Lauri
						lauri@cs.cornell.edu