🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <9602051257.AA29046@dxmint.cern.ch>, Dan Pop
<danpop@mail.cern.ch> wrote:

>kjfair@midway.uchicago.edu (Kenneth Jason Fair) writes:
>
>>Maybe you're interested in running infinite loop programs like that on
>>your machine, but I can't think of a single instance where I've needed
>>to.  I'm interested in using software that actually has a point.
>
>There is plenty of software that has a point, yet it's very similar to the
>infinite loop program, except that: 1) it does some computation inside
>the loop and 2) it eventually exits the loop.  Such programs can run for
>hours, days, weeks or months before exiting the loop.  During this time,
>the Mac is not available to any other applications.
>
>A scientist or engineer who wants to run his programs, developed on other
>systems, on his Mac, via a simple compilation (they were written in
>portable C, after all) is in the situation of not being able to use the Mac
>for any other purposes.  Or to learn the misteries of MacOS, on which he
>doesn't have any interest, because he's not a Mac programmer, he's only a
>Mac user.

See, and even here your code is likely to multitask cooperatively.  Why? 
Because you have to do one of two things to make your code run on the Mac:

1) Add Mac-specific code so that it will run like a normal Mac program.
In which case, you will have to learn about programming on the Mac.

2) If you don't add Mac-specific code, but compile it on Symantec's or
Metrowerks' compilers, the compiler wraps a Mac shell around the program
to let you see I/O.  That shell will call WaitNextEvent for you.  Or
even if it didn't, all you have to do is add a couple of #includes
and throw a WaitNextEvent into your main loop.

Yeah, you can come up with situations where you can't run anything else
on the Mac.  So what?  If you're that worried about it, and can't take
fifteen minutes to figure it out, don't use a Macintosh.  No one has 
said that CMT is as robust as PMT.  I agree that MacOS needs to become
preemptively multitasking.  But it's just not as big of an issue as some
people think.  I'd much rather the folks at Apple spend more time worrying
about improving the MacOS memory model, adding new features, and 
maintaining backwards compatibility than worry about an issue that doesn't
come up 99.9% of the time.

I'm not even going to discuss the portability of "portable" code.

-- 
KEN FAIR - U. Chicago Law  | Power Mac! | Net since '90 | Net.cop
kjfair@midway.uchicago.edu | CABAL(tm) Member | I'm w/in McQ - R U?
          ** Fuck the Communications Decency Act of 1996. **
Why does George Carlin determine the seven words I cannot say?