Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!lll-winken!ames!pasteur!ucbvax!decwrl!labrea!Portia!Jessica!rick
From: rick@Jessica.stanford.edu (Rick Wong)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.mac.programmer
Subject: Re: MacApp questions
Message-ID: <1077@Portia.Stanford.EDU>
Date: 23 Mar 89 03:14:16 GMT
References: <568190@vaxa.uwa.oz> <27618@apple.Apple.COM>
Sender: USENET News System <news@Portia.stanford.edu>
Reply-To: rick@Jessica.stanford.edu (Rick Wong)
Organization: Stanford University
Lines: 49

In article <27618@apple.Apple.COM> keith@Apple.COM (Keith Rollin) writes:
>In article <568190@vaxa.uwa.oz> a_dent@vaxa.uwa.oz (Andy Dent, ph: 09 380 2620) writes:
>>I'm looking for general comments on using MacApp, particularly with either
>>Object Pascal and Object Assembler.
>>
>>3)  How hard is it to use Object Assembler?  I got the impression that MacApp
>>    only requires you to write relatively small amounts of code and so using
>>    Assembler might not be too painful?
>
>There is only one person that I know of that uses Object Assembler, and that is
>Rick Wong at Stanford. If there are others out there, I'd like to hear about
>your experiences.
>

Since I've been singled out, I guess I should follow up.

The biggest problem with using Object Assembler is mixing it with Object
Pascal and keeping all your assembly class definitions in synch with your
Pascal class definitions.  The only interfaces Apple supplies for it are
to TObject, so you can't call any methods belonging to TApplication, TView,
or whatever, unless you write your own interfaces to them.  Since hardly
anyone uses Object Assembler, I don't blame Apple for not supplying such
interfaces -- having to keep all that stuff up to date would probably slow
down the Excellent work the MacApp group has been doing.

(By the way, Keith, ObjMacros.a still hasn't been fixed in MPW 3.0.)

It's misleading to assume that MacApp only requires you to write small
amounts of code.  Rather, it saves you the work of having to write most
of the Macintosh-specific stuff, like window-handling, menu-handling,
scrolling, memory management, filing, and so on.  You're still going
to have to write the code specific to your application.

I would recommend using Object Pascal for 99% of your MacApp programming.
I would only use assembly for especially time-critical sections of code.
Even then, it's probably best to write some "wrapper" method in Pascal,
which would then call a plain ol' assembly routine, passing it whatever
fields it needed as regular parameters on the stack.

You should not let MacApp's supposed slowness dissuade you from using it.
Most talk about MacApp being slow is based on the molassicity (sorry)
of applications built with MacApp's debugging gear.  Without debugging,
MacApp's speed really is comparable to that of an application developed in
an "old-fashioned" language.


Rick "No, it's Hair Pie" Wong
Courseware Authoring Tools Project, Stanford University
rick@jessica.stanford.edu