Relay-Version: version B 2.10 5/3/83; site utzoo.UUCP Posting-Version: version B 2.10 UW 5/3/83; site uw-beaver Path: utzoo!watmath!clyde!burl!ulysses!cbosgd!cbdkc1!desoto!packard!hoxna!houxm!vax135!cornell!uw-beaver!info-mac From: info-mac@uw-beaver (info-mac) Newsgroups: fa.info-mac Subject: Re: Report on Manx C Message-ID: <1806@uw-beaver> Date: Thu, 27-Sep-84 21:07:53 EDT Article-I.D.: uw-beave.1806 Posted: Thu Sep 27 21:07:53 1984 Date-Received: Thu, 4-Oct-84 02:04:29 EDT Sender: daemon@uw-beave Organization: U of Washington Computer Science Lines: 26 From: winkler@harvard.ARPA (Dan Winkler) Yes, xlisp does work without the Manx shell. Manx supplies several versions of "croot", which is the function that gets called before main. There is one version for programs that are meant to be called from the Manx shell and that might be passed argc and argv. There is another version for stand alone Mac applications that will be called from the finder and that will not use the C stdio library. And there is a third version that allows programs such as xlisp to be called from the finder but to use the C stdio library. It's quite a surprise the first time you launch a program like xlisp from the finder. The menu bar disappears. The mouse doesn't do anything. There are no windows or icons. QuickDraw lies idle except for drawing one monospaced, plain style, single size font. Your innovative, user-friendly, graphics machine gets transformed into an old fashioned, Unix-pdp11-style, ascii only computer. Steve Jobs would be horrified. But it points out an important fact about the Mac's capabilities: they are a superset of those of older machines. If you don't want to use the mouse or icons or windows, you don't have to; you can just boot a different disk and get a Unix interface instead. (Although, as Mark Lentczner remarked, if you do decide to use the Mac ROM, you are constrained to using it only in the way Apple meant it to be used.)