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Path: utzoo!watmath!clyde!bonnie!akgua!whuxlm!harpo!decvax!genrad!mit-eddie!think!ISM780!darryl
From: darryl@ISM780.UUCP
Newsgroups: net.micro.mac
Subject: NEON! ?
Message-ID: <25400007@ISM780.UUCP>
Date: Tue, 2-Jul-85 12:03:00 EDT
Article-I.D.: ISM780.25400007
Posted: Tue Jul  2 12:03:00 1985
Date-Received: Fri, 5-Jul-85 06:14:24 EDT
Lines: 63
Nf-ID: #N:ISM780:25400007:000:3153
Nf-From: ISM780!darryl    Jul  2 12:03:00 1985


Is anybody out there using NEON! ?  I just purchased it the other
day, and so far it seems to be a very complete development
package (but I haven't really tried very much yet).  Basically,
NEON! is a forth system with enough words to build a
smalltalk-like environment.  It comes with one disk, that is NOT
write protected, and a manual.  Kriya Systems (developers of
NEON!) say that you can sell your created applications
royalty-free.

The manual has several hundred pages and the type is rather
small.  The first part of the manual is a tutorial.  It starts
off very simple (which is good for a forth neophyte like me), but
quickly gets into macros, classes, and objects.  None of the
tutorials left me hanging, but there is still a fair amount (for
an object-oriented neophyte like me) that goes unsaid about the
smalltalk environment.

The reference sections of the manual are perhaps slightly terser
than the Unix Programmer's Manual, but at least every word has
its own entry.  But just like Unix, it's hard to find something
if you don't know that it exists (or what it's called).  There are
sections that describe the (very interesting) implementation of
classes, objects, methods, and ivars, but (again for a neophyte
like me) they are very arcane.  I usually understand what they
were trying to tell me in one of these sections after I have, by
hook or by crook, fixed a bug related to the implementation
described therein.

Unfortunately, debugging is not as well aided as I had hoped it
would be.  I often crash the system in obscure ways (once I tried
to write "new: self" inside of a new: method definition).  But
because of the tendency to write *VERY* short methods, errors are
usually *VERY* localized, and therefore easy to figure out (the
fix to the above problem was to say "new: super", which did not
recurse through all of memory).

All the same, I am very pleased with the system so far, partly
because it is yeilding to my attempts to figure it out, and also
because, even saddled with my learning curve, I was able to
create a window on the screen on my first try.  The system is
very modular -- bring in only those classes you need.  If their
class is too general, or not general enough, write your own --
they supply the sources to all of the classes except some basic
ones like Int or Var.  Appearantly (I haven't checked this out
completely) all of the toolbox routines can be invoked with
whatever parameters you'd like to supply.

Kriya supplies a version of the MockWrite editor, which you use
as a DA while working with their interpretter.  Generally, the
prefered modus operandi is to write some code with the editor,
save it in a file just-in-case, copy it and paste it into the
interpretter, and see what happens.

If there's any interest, I'll post my feelings about it when I
have actually done something with NEON!.  Unfortunately, that's
not likely to be very soon because my employers have me slaving
away, trying to set computing back years with another 80286
project.  SIGH.

	    --Darryl Richman, INTERACTIVE Systems Corp.
	    ...!cca!ima!ism780!darryl
	    The views expressed above are my opinions only.