🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <1991Mar15.050522.21309@athena.cs.uga.edu> mcovingt@athena.cs.uga.edu (Michael A. Covington) writes:
>Of course you have to remember that Borland has a truly *gigantic*
>corps of beta-testers. Most companies would be hard put to assemble 
>such a group. In fact I'll bet Arity is constantly up against the problem
>that they can't get enough people to test the product, thoroughly enough,
>during the beta phase.

I want to make sure that people who may have not read my previous posts
understand that nowhere in my posting that started this discussion thread
did I imply that Arity Prolog 6.0 was buggy. In fact, I feel that Arity's
implementation of Edinburgh style Prolog is as stable as anything else I've
seen.

My complaints are based on two major points.
1. Arity has not provided new documentation since 5.0 in 1988. Versions 5.1
and 6.0 have made a number of confusing changes and additions to some of
their proprietary extensions. There is no source of information besides
Arity to go to to clarify these predicate extensions (i.e., you're not going
to learn how to use these extensions by reading a Clocksin & Mellish or
O'Keefe book). In addition the 5.0 manual was incredibly error ridden. It
is not an overstatement to say that there is at least one technical error
or on every other page. And, more likely, you are likely to find several
errors of a single page that has code samples.
2. Arity claimed in their upgrade notice and implied in their version
number shift (from 5.1 to 6.0) that this was a significant upgrade and a
major overhaul of the system which has numerous shortcomings in providing a
modern programming environments (when compared to Borland C++, Quick C,
Actor, etc.) for the MS-DOS platform. They also charged (by PC standards) a
large upgrade fee (~$120) for what is essentially a maintenance release.

As to having a large number of beta-testers for QA.  I don't think that QA
in terms of operational bugs is the issue here. The issue, in my mind at
least, is that Arity is out of step with current trends in programming
environments. Their environment is as out of step with today's standards as
a line editor was to full screen editors a few years ago.

>But I agree, Borland's reliability and support are exemplary.

Agreed.. BTW.. I don't claim that Borland C++ 2.0 is bug free. I just
haven't had it long enough to make such a statement. I will say one thing
though. I was pleasantly surprised to find that the program examples in
Petzold's "Programming for Windows" which was written for use with
Microsoft C and SDK work without modifications when compiled using Borland
C++. Arity's examples, on the other hand, won't even compile in their own
compiler without modifications.
--
Todd Ogasawara, U. of Hawaii
UUCP:		{uunet,ucbvax,dcdwest}!ucsd!nosc!uhunix!todd
BITNET:		todd@uhunix
INTERNET:	todd@uhunix.UHCC.HAWAII.EDU