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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.)