Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!cs.utexas.edu!execu!sequoia!rpp386!woody
From: woody@rpp386.cactus.org (Woodrow Baker)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.postscript
Subject: Re: Why a postscript language?
Summary: why
Message-ID: <17543@rpp386.cactus.org>
Date: 3 Jan 90 15:58:36 GMT
References: <33444@ucbvax.BERKELEY.EDU>
Distribution: usa
Organization: River Parishes Programming, Plano, TX
Lines: 21

In article <33444@ucbvax.BERKELEY.EDU>, josh@dewey.soe.berkeley.edu (Josh Putnam) writes:
> 
> Why is PostScript the way it is? Why not use a lisp-like language?
> Is it because of the simple implementation? Does a postscript language
> make page description easier?
> 
> Josh Putnam
A threaded style language, with a RPN structure is inherantly easier and
faster to interpret.  As for making page descriptions easier, it does not.
Describing the page is a separate operation.  What Postscript does is give
you an incredably powerful programming language, and an imaging model
that allows the RENDERING of the page to be size independant as well as
sophisticated.  Because you are essentially creating a program to image
out a page, much of the work can be pushed off on the printer.  The
ability to scale and rotate images and text enables the RENDERING of
the page to be more general and flexible than that of say a bit-mapped
page. or even a fixed font size implementation.

Cheers
Woody