Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!cs.utexas.edu!uunet!intercon!amanda From: amanda@intercon.com (Amanda Walker) Newsgroups: comp.lang.postscript Subject: Re: PostScript Language Message-ID: <1990Feb24.023206.28525@intercon.com> Date: 24 Feb 90 02:32:06 GMT References: <9447@imagen.UUCP> Organization: InterCon Systems Corporation, Sterling, VA Lines: 50 In article <9447@imagen.UUCP> ib@apolling (Ivan N. Bach) writes a heated flame about how "if we leave it to Adobe to design our page and document description languages," all sorts of evil nasty things will happen. Maybe. PostScript may well become the COBOL of page-oriented graphics formats. That's not such a bad thing, as much as I hate to defend COBOL :-). For those applications where it is more effective to still be using PostScript instead of cutting over to some newer "standard"-- and there will always be newer "standards," have no fear--we may well be still translating into postfix notation and spitting ASCII files at our printers. So? Adobe cannot control technology. They leapfrogged the rest of the industry with PostScript, but nothing says someone else won't do the same thing with something better than PostScript, perhaps addressing some of the very issues we argue about here. However, I don't think we're all in as much danger as all that. PostScript was designed with some very specific goals and design constraints. Many of us here on this newsgroup have found ways to "push the envelope" of that design, but the farther you get away from the laser printer/laser recorder design center, the less appropriate PostScript is right now. If you have an ion-deposition printer that prints at 50 pages a second, or a full-motion video display, or whatever people come up with in the next ten years, PostScript, at least as it currently exists, may not be able to make effective use of your hardware. Then again, maybe it will be. If you can drop a 150-200 MIPS processor with graphics hardware into your printer controller, you may be able to interpret PostScript at 50 pps for most jobs, just as you can now interpret PostScript at 5-8 ppm for most jobs with a 1 MIPS processor. One of the characteristics of PostScript's design center is that the speed of the marking engine is the major bottleneck. For some combinations, that isn't true. I would argue that given the speed over time curves of the controller circuitry are much steeper than that of the mechanical portions of any printer. PostScript is like Lisp in that it's a "ball of mud" in some ways. Lisp was invented over 30 years ago, and it's still going strong. PostScript isn't doing too bad of a job of following in its footsteps, although it's still pretty early to second-guess future history. -- Amanda Walker InterCon Systems Corporation -- "Many of the things we hold true depend greatly upon our own point of view." --Obi-Wan Kenobi in "Return of the Jedi"