Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!rutgers!psuvax1!psuvm.bitnet!cunyvm!nyser!cmx!rodan.acs.syr.edu!pcossenb
From: pcossenb@rodan.acs.syr.edu (Paul C. Ossenbruggen)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.mac.programmer
Subject: Re: Think C Includes (was "APDA on a disk")
Message-ID: <1575@cmx.npac.syr.edu>
Date: 23 May 89 08:52:13 GMT
Sender: usenet@cmx.npac.syr.edu
Reply-To: pcossenb@rodan.acs.syr.edu
Organization: Syracuse University, Syracuse, New York
Lines: 51

While on the subject of improvements to LSC, which I have been using for about
three years, I thought I would add some of my rather small suggestions.

When LSC opens the resource file that has the same name as your project with
the .rsrc extension it does not check to see if that resource file is already
open from another application. This is a major problem when you are using
ResEdit and LSC together in a Multifinder environment because, depending on
is going on at the time, the machine may hang badly if you accidentally forget
to close the resource file in ResEdit and try to run your program. I have tried
to resolve this problem by checking ResError() before the program does anything
else but it still crashes. Any suggestions? So it would be really nice if LSC
put up a dialog box saying that the resource file is already open - sort of
like ResEdit does.

Another problems was with the Find... dialog doing multi-file searches. I have
found a undocumented feature (at least I can't find it) which greatly improves
the situation. It was a slow procedure to click on the Multi-file search button
to select all of the .c files. The solution I found was to type Command-A in
the main Find dialog and LSC will check all the .c files in the project.
This is so much faster. So this really is not a problem now, but it was just
chance that I found that solution. Had anyone else known that?

There needs to be a better way to handle multiple small code resources. I had
this project once that needed lots of little code resources to be loaded in
while the program was running. It was a real pain to have a separate project
for each of the little code resources. Especially since, they all shared a
common header file and if I changed the header I would have to reload each
project file one by one and recompile them. I suppose MPW would be better for
something like this (I can't afford that).

It is sometimes useful to have more than one copy of LSC running at one time.
However, the Debugger does not know what to do when you have two copies of LSC
running with the Debugger on. Last time I tried it it crashed. Either LSC
should not allow this or it should allow two debugger sessions to be run.

I also agree that there should be some easy way to get to the files in the
Macheaders file or to access reference files. How about a user configurable
menu that allows you to attach files that you frequently look at. Right now
I put the entire reference file in comments, add a .c extension and add it to
my project. There ought to be a better way.

I find the LSC programming environment is wonderful. I really want to thank
Think for the symbolic debugger. It has saved me an incredible amount of time.
I can hardly wait for Object C and later C++.

- Paul

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
|  Paul C. Ossenbruggen                     pcossenb@rodan.acs.syr.edu        |
|  Syracuse University                      rspco@suvm.bitnet                 |
|                                            pcossenb@sunrise.acs.syr.edu      |