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From: folta@tove.umd.edu (Wayne Folta)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.lisp
Subject: MACL 1.3
Summary: Nice!  But a bug?...  And some typos?...
Message-ID: <21706@mimsy.umd.edu>
Date: 9 Jan 90 02:36:41 GMT
Sender: news@mimsy.umd.edu
Reply-To: folta@tove.umd.edu (Wayne Folta)
Distribution: usa
Organization: U of Maryland, Dept. of Computer Science, Coll. Pk., MD 20742
Lines: 49

I just received MACL 1.3, and it is a nice improvement over 1.2.2.  The
redone manual is much more informative, and everything seems more integrated.

One question (for those who might know)... I create a window and draw into
it thus (with deletion of uninteresting stuff):

  (let ((output (oneof *window*))
       ...
    (dotimes ...
       ...
        (ask output (fill-rect
                     (if (= 0 (aref board row col))
                       *black-pattern* *white-pattern*)
                     (* col 5) (* 5 row) (+ (* col 5) 5) (+ (* row 5) 5)))))
       ...)

If I close the window 'output', by clicking in its go-away box, the routine
continues drawing to the screen, overwriting the desktop.  I don't think
that it used to do this.  I realize that I should take some action upon
window close, but should MACL allow this writing where a window used to be?

Also, there seem to be quite a few typos in the documentation, where a space
is listed instead of a dash (I count 11 of these in the menu section):

   (ask foo-menu (menu items))

instead of

   (ask foo-menu (menu-items))

At least I get things to work with the second syntax, not the first.

One last suggestion...  The one-page intro to menus in the 1.2.2 doc (page 5-3)
was a pretty nice overview of menus and menubars.  It may have been nice to
keep it in 1.3's documentation.  (A divider insert for QuickDraw, Appendix B,
would have been nice--I reused the one from 1.2.2)

MACL 1.3 is a nice step up from 1.2.2 (though expensive at $100), and a 
side-by-side comparison with the old manual shows that more and more Mac
features are available to the LISPer.

The debugging section is *much* nicer, too.

Thanks, Apple people, and I hate to pick nits, but we are striving for the
perfect development environment, aren't we?...
--


Wayne Folta          (folta@cs.umd.edu  128.8.128.8)