🚀 go-pugleaf

( are there REALLY line eaters out there? )

MPW (The Macintosh Programmer's Workshop) is currently in beta test. It
should see wider release later this year (September???). As a beta-tester,
I can tell you that it is pretty wonderful. It is easily as powerful and
complete as any development system available on any machine (including UNIX,
all you diehards). About the only thing it really lacks is a source level
debugger.

The C compiler is based on Green Hills C, and generates very good code.
The libraries which Interface to the ROMs all expect C strings, which
I don't particularly like. The standard C library is extremely complete.
Most UNIX text processing utilities will compile without changes (this
includes yacc). The library even includes such rare features as ioctl(),
fcntl(), faccess(), and the entire signal handling library.

The Pascal compiler is also pretty nice. It supports all of the Lisa Pascal
features, which isn't surprising since it is a port of Lisa Pascal. It also
supports Object Pascal, which is used as a base for MacApp. The libraries for
this compiler are very good. My only complaint about this compiler is that it
is SLOW. Code generation is not of the same caliber as the C compiler.

The assembler is also very nice, and it supports a very powerful macro
facility. Haven't used it much, so I cannot really say much about it. It
is fairly quick, however.

The Shell is a combination editor and program execution environment. MPW
programs are special tools, and they can have their output piped, or
redirected. Almost all features of csh are here, in one form or
another, including aliasing, environment variables, and programming
constructs (for, if, loop, etc). The editor is better than MDS edit,
but not quite as nice as QUED. Where it shines, though, is in the
area of search and replace. MPW's regular expression language is as
full featured and powerful as that of the UNIX tools (ex, vi, grep).

Finally, there are two very powerful tools that deal with resources, Rez
and DeRez. Rez is a replacement for RMaker, with a c-like syntax and the
ability to define your own resource types. DeRez can take your types and
dissasemble a resource file into a file usable by Rez. These two tools are
incredibly powerful when combined with the Resource Editor.

The one major negative thing about MPW that I can say is that it is a
bit of a resources hog. It chews an incredible amount of disk space
(although Apple claims it can be used on a dual 800K floppy system,
I wouldn't want to try it), and it also requires large amounts of
memory. On my MacPlus at work, its fine, but my 512K at home runs out
of memory far too often. Unfortunately, running out of memory usually
crashes the machine as well.

All in all though, it is a new standard in development environments. The
power and flexibility are unmatched by any system I have ever used. When
it does come out, I expect it to become the new standard.

Andrew Shebanow