Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!torsqnt!tmsoft!masnet!canremote!greg.trice
From: greg.trice@canremote.uucp (GREG TRICE)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.atari.st
Subject: Re: Shareware MAC
Message-ID: <89122619395637@masnet.uucp>
Date: 12 Dec 89 14:42:00 GMT
Organization: Canada Remote Systems Limited, Mississauga, ON, Canada
Lines: 21

Yes I have, lots of it. What you don't realize is that just because 
Apple needed 128k of code, and N man-years of work doesn't necessarily 
mean that the task at hand needs that. Depending on the skill - and more
important - insight - of programmers, the same task may result in 
solutions that are very different in code size and time taken. I have 
examples at hand of functionally identical programs, one of which is 
twenty times the size of the other. And the large one probably took 
fifty times as long to debug. I've never disassembled a Mac ROM, so I 
can't give any views on the quality of the code therein, but knowing (a)
how slow a Mac is and (b) that some at least of the code was written in 
Pascal (probably by some structured programming fetishist) I suspect 
that most of the code is pretty awful. 
  Of course I wasn't necessarily advocating that anybody actually try 
it; knowing Apple's penchant for suing everybody, I'd have every 
incentive to make any machine I designed as unlike a Mac as possible. 
Anyway, is there really any genuinely indispensable program available 
only on the Mac? Even if there were, it would probably be an easier task
to patch the program to run on the ST than create an (even slower) Mac 
emulator.
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