🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <147@heaven.woodside.ca.us>, glenn@heaven.woodside.ca.us (Glenn Reid) writes:
> In article <38910@apple.Apple.COM> kchen@Apple.COM (Kok Chen) writes:
> >ib@apolling (Ivan N. Bach) writes:
> >>Ivan N. Bach                      Tel (408) 986-9400, x508
> >>QMS, Inc.                         Fax (408) 727-3725 
> >
> 
> I think it's a lot simpler and a lot less pure than the free market
> system or communications bandwidth.  I do think PostScript is successful
> because it is an elegant design and it's wonderful and all that, but

I'm not so sure about elegant design.  I don't like thinking backwards.
I'm getting used to it sort of, but have seriously considered writing a
front end that takes normal syntax, and mungs it around for postscript.
I think that   moveto 100,100
is somewhat more intuitive than
	100 100 moveto..

> 
> No, I think PostScript succeeded mainly because it is ASCII.  People
> can understand something that they can see.  People like that.  A lot

Absolutely, but I think it should be full 8 bits....
> 
> A hell of a lot more people know how to work text editors than
> know how to read octal dumps.  You can drag graphic designers

I get more and more amazed as the world goes 'round. OCTAL DUMPS?
I thought we buried octal decades ago.  

g

> and sales people (not to slight them, of course, but to pick some folks
> who probably have never written any programs) into a classroom and
> get them to print their names on a sheet of paper in 100 point Times
> Roman in about 15 minutes.  Try to do that with a binary-encoded
> token stream with packed arrays, 0-padded bytes, run-length
> encoded bits, checksums, and end-of-file indicators.

Yep. This is a well taken point.  I have sold many POSTSCRIPT printers,
and with the exeption of 3 or 4, have taught the purchasers of them to
program in Postscript.  In the IBM world, at the time, MS Word was the
only way to use Postscript, and if you wanted to do graphics, it was
grab your text editor and learn postscript.  Actually, you probably
could do it in less than 15 min. (get them printing thier name).
Yes, postscript is wordy.  The stream is large.  The bandwidth gets
wasted.  BUT, If it is written CORRECTLY, it is easy to fix and easy to
maintain.  Postscript is slow. very slow....In comparison to what?....
Part of that is due to it's wordyness, part is due to it's interpreted
nature, and part of it is due to the fact that it uses software floating
point in most implementations...


> 
> Throughout the history of the computer industry, the computer people
> start out designing something that is very clean, simple, elegant,
> and efficient on the bottom, and by the time it gets to the user, it
> is inconsistent, quirky, slow, incomprehensible, and ugly.  But
> people buy it because there's nothing better, learn to live with
> it because people are good at adjusting to things, and the
> computer people think they've done something wonderful, so they turn
> around and do it again, from scratch, and make it totally different
> than the last one.  That's because computer people love the work they
> are doing, and they would never want to do the same thing over and
> over again, and besides, it can be made more wonderful!  I know that,
> because I am a computer person.  But I've also watched people try to
> use computers for years, and there's not a computer system on earth
> that's as useful to a human being as a Makita cordless drill is to the
> average carpenter.  Or if it is, somebody will suddenly change the
> software on her to make it more wonderful, but it may not be able to
> read all of her data files; sorry.
> 
> Anyway, PostScript is great because you can see it, edit it, write
> more of it, and even complain about it.  Most of us couldn't do any of
> these things if it weren't ASCII.  So what if it takes a little longer
> to get where it's going?  Besides, there are more MIPS and megabytes
> every time you wake up.
> 
> There are people who care about whether a 100-page-per-minute printer
> keeps up to its rated speed, and there are specialized solutions for
> those people.  I value reliability and consistent output about 100
> to 1 over speed.  That is, I'd rather have a 1 ppm printer that always
> got the right answer, because I could go to sleep and have it print
> the draft of my book, than have a 100 ppm printer that couldn't print


> page 3 and wanted me to click "OK" when I woke up in the morning.

My current POSTSCRIPT printer does that to me, under windows....:-}