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From: avie@wb1.cs.cmu.edu (Avadis Tevanian)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.next
Subject: Re: NextStep and NeWS...
Keywords: NextStep,NeWS,Postscript
Message-ID: <4759@pt.cs.cmu.edu>
Date: 19 Apr 89 01:23:58 GMT
References: <1041@nixctc.DE> <8530@polya.Stanford.EDU> <3901@ficc.uu.net> <7605@zodiac.UUCP>
Organization: NeXT, Inc.
Lines: 30

In article <7605@zodiac.UUCP> jtn@ads.com (John Nelson) writes:
>In article <3901@ficc.uu.net> peter@ficc.uu.net (Peter da Silva) writes:
>>In article <8530@polya.Stanford.EDU>, ali@polya.Stanford.EDU (Ali T. Ozer) writes:
>>> One of the goals of NextStep is to make sure the programmer does not have
>>> to write any more PostScript than is necessary to do the his/her custom
>>> drawing. All user interface objects exist in Objective C...
>>
>>Is this really so desirable? I thought NeWS' model was a very nice division
>>of labor. You get a much greater degree of user programmability as well. Why
>>is it more desirable to hardcode interface decisions into the application?
>
>This is a very important question I think.

The premise behind the question is wrong.  Nothing is hard coded into an
application, other than the fact that it is using windows/views/menus/etc.
The implementation of these classes, i.e. NextStep, presents a single, uniform
user interface to the user.  Anyone can subclass these classes and get new
behaviour, but at the risk of presenting a different user interface.

The thing to remember about NextStep is that you generally program in C or
Objective-C (or Common Lisp or Objective Fortran).  If you have some
complicated graphics that you wish to use, you can drop into Postscript
whenver you wish, but we generally find that programming in C is much
easier than Postscript.

-- 
Avadis Tevanian, Jr.    (Avie)
Chief Operating System Scientist
NeXT, Inc.
avie@cs.cmu.edu or avie@NeXT.com
--