Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!wuarchive!zaphod.mps.ohio-state.edu!mips!apple!rutgers!att!cbnewsm!mls
From: mls@cbnewsm.ATT.COM (mike.siemon)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.mac
Subject: Re: Text file madness on the Mac.
Message-ID: <8315@cbnewsm.ATT.COM>
Date: 6 Jan 90 03:46:02 GMT
References: <2706@aecom.yu.edu> <5900@ncar.ucar.edu> <1998@eric.mpr.ca> <5915@ncar.ucar.edu>
Distribution: na
Organization: AT&T Bell Laboratories
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The defensiveness of Mac fanatics about the oddities of the system is
obscuring the point.  It is particularly obnoxious to be told that all
applications "should" create files with the signature of Teach Text,
given that essentially none of them do, and given that what I might
*want* to do with a randomly created file is *not* necessarily page
through it.

The example of reading an arbitrary file is just that, an example of a
much larger general problem.  If I have a file I may want to use it in
a number of different ways, totally unconstrained by the file's origin
or by my intentions when I create the file.

On my Mac (of which I am quite fond, by the way) an application *either*

   - creates files in a special form, saying "mine, mine;" [like an excited
     and possessive Daffy Duck] "nobody else can use this!" -- unless they
     build in an infinity of "conversion" routines or one has a program/DA
     doing nothing but conversions

*or*

   - creates files in a "generic" format like TEXT or MacPaint or suchlike;
     and then *nobody* can use it, without going through some such nonsense
     as locating an application, invoking it in some utterly useless state
     closing *that* state and hunting through some menus to get back to the
     file you started with and are interested in.

May I point out that 5 years after the introduction of the Mac, it's still
regarded as a neat new commercial utility, heavily advertised in the pages
of the Mac rags, to have something that can actually *open* any given file.
Sure there are lots of ways to do this, some quite old.  What is bizarre
is the *need* for it.

You can specify an arbitrary file, and get the application (if any) it is
associated with.  You can specify an arbitrary application and get any files
it (thinks it) is prepared to cope with.  But you cannot specify an arbitary
file and an arbitrary application TOGETHER.  A new application may know all
sorts of neat conversions to operate on earlier kinds of output; the older
applications are then practically guaranteed to be unable to cope with the
output of the new one.

The Mac is wonderful for all sorts of one-off, custom jury-rigged situations
and for a small set of highly stylized standard applications.  What it is
*very* bad at is generalization and abstraction -- areas where one has to
step *outside* the details and deal with them "algebraically" (as in the
regular expression matching of filenames or of text in a file or of patterns
of output in the intermediate stages of a complex operation.)  The Mac is
slick (and often fun) on the immediate details, but every detail has to be
dealt with one at a time.
-- 
Michael L. Siemon		I say "You are gods, sons of the
cucard!dasys1!mls		Most High, all of you; nevertheless
att!sfbat!mls			you shall die like men, and fall
standard disclaimer		like any prince."   Psalm 82:6-7