🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <1992Oct27.011127.12969@cs.aukuni.ac.nz>, jwil1@cs.aukuni.ac.nz (TMOTA) writes:
> They do. But imagine having a library of SOURCE code. Imagine saying "I

The source code is obviously very desirable, it's just that commercial
companies are understandably reluctant to release it (as are many PD authors).

> Yes. Annoying, isn't it? And the trouble is that the more the library
> does for you automatically the more interlocked it gets. To de-interlock
> the code fragments, you need to drop to a slightly lower level, where the

I'm not sure that this is necessarily true, it's just harder work for the
people who write the library. My understanding of the object-oriented
philosophy (which I admit is very limited) is that it facilitates exactly
this "de-interlocking" of relatively high-level constructs.

> No, but then again, the windowmanager is in ROM, so it doesn't cost

Well, there's no reason why RISCOSlib couldn't be in ROM either (or loaded
as a shared module in RAM). In fact, as I understand it the mechanics of making
a shared library aren't all that complicated. How about Acorn, or failing
that some PD person, making a tool to let any library be made into a shared
module? I can't see it being any more complicated than, say, cmhg. Would some
Acorn person be prepared to tell us how it's done?

> any generic library) it is impossible to supply *just* the needed code
> without adding any 'unused' or 'unnecessary' code into the bargain.

This is true, but it depends how much you care. If a 40 Kb program gets
blown up to 80 Kb I think that's not very serious, especially if it lets
you write the code in half the time.

> library upon the small, useful, stand-alone functions that are handy, rather
> than an all-singing, all-dancing organism.

The trouble is that small functions are, by definition, the ones that are
easier to write yourself anyway. I would personally like a library which can,
say, take a draw file and display it in some standard way on the screen with
essentially a single call. Of course, I'd also like to be able to "tweak" it to
do things slightly differently without having to re-write the whole thing. To
take another example, I like the fact that RISCOSlib provides a simple way of
dealing with the load/save protocols (which is not to say that it couldn't be
improved). I've also coded these directly in Basic, and it took a lot of effort
to get it to work.

  PS to Jason Williams: I'm having trouble sending stuff to c.b.a; is there a
problem at your end?

e----><----p | Stephen Burke           | Internet: burke@vxdesy.desy.de
 H   H   1   | Gruppe FH1T (Liverpool) | DECnet:   vxdesy::burke (13313::burke)
 H   H  11   | DESY, Notkestrasse 85   | BITNET:   BURKE@DESYVAX or SB2@UKACRL
 HHHHH   1   | 2000 Hamburg 52         | JANET:    sb2@uk.ac.rl.ib
 H   H   1   | Germany                 | Phone:    + 49 40 8998 2282
 H   H 11111 | HERA, the world's largest electron microscope!