Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!ncar!boulder!pratt
From: pratt@boulder.Colorado.EDU (Jonathan Pratt)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.mac.programmer
Subject: Re: The USENET Macintosh Programmer's Guide
Summary: Too many bugs make free worse than nothing.
Keywords: Programming Guide
Message-ID: <7606@boulder.Colorado.EDU>
Date: 22 Mar 89 01:27:56 GMT
References: <929@fornax.UUCP> <931@fornax.UUCP>
Sender: news@boulder.Colorado.EDU
Reply-To: pratt@boulder.Colorado.EDU (Jonathan Pratt)
Organization: University of Colorado, Boulder
Lines: 34

In article <931@fornax.UUCP> mcdonald@fornax.UUCP (Ken Mcdonald) writes:
>words, a line seems to have gone astray.  Between the two above lines was a
>line noting the existence of a nice LSP source file for topical help on sumex,
                                ^^^^ ^^^ ^^^^^^ ^^^^
It's ironic that this particular piece of code should be mentioned.  In the
recent survey on the proposed programming guide I opined that it's a good
idea provided code like that could be avoided!  I ended up spending more
time tracking down the bugs in that than if I had written an equivalent
from scratch.  Among other things, the topical help code: doesn't dispose
of the TEHandle when it's through, doesn't keep ModalDialog from pro-
cessing mouseDowns after topical help has already used them, doesn't
update properly, declares unused globals, etc.  I have another list
of philisophical disagreements, but these are opinion related things,
such as checking for insufficient memory, supporting pre-Styled Text
edit, and only using one global to reduce demands on the host.

Don't get me wrong - I think more souce code should be posted, but I
believe it should a little better tested than that apparently was.
BTW, if the original author would give permission, I would be happy
to post the version I rewrote.  Another thing that annoyed me about
topical help was the authors reference to "my other program," uWrite.
This program would be useful for creating styled text, but no mention
was made of how to obtain it (Free? PD? Shareware? Commercial? where?)
Anyway, I ended up writing a DA that grabs styled text from the clipboard
so I could use Draw II or Works II.  If anyone else needs a TEXT/styl
scrap to Resource file DA, let me know and I will upload.

Jonathan


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