🚀 go-pugleaf

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"