Path: utzoo!utgpu!water!watmath!clyde!att!osu-cis!tut.cis.ohio-state.edu!bloom-beacon!mit-eddie!bbn!rochester!cornell!uw-beaver!tektronix!tekgen!teksce!dales
From: dales@teksce.SCE.TEK.COM (Dale Snell)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.amiga
Subject: Re: comp.binaries.amiga (was Re: Picture swap)
Summary: Oh no, not again
Message-ID: <1462@teksce.SCE.TEK.COM>
Date: 22 Jun 88 02:22:39 GMT
References: <8806161902.AA16559@cory.Berkeley.EDU> <417@jc3b21.UUCP> <2827@umd5.umd.edu> <9701@g.ms.uky.edu>
Reply-To: dales@teksce.SCE.TEK.COM (Dale Snell)
Distribution: na
Organization: The Thumps Memorial Home for the Recursively Bemused
Lines: 98

[  Trust the Computer.  The Computer is your friend.  ]
     Tossing in my $0.02 worth...

In article <9701@g.ms.uky.edu> sean@ms.uky.edu (Sean Casey) writes:
|In article <2827@umd5.umd.edu> louie@trantor.umd.edu (Louis A. Mamakos) writes:
|>All of the Amiga owners that I know have a C compiler.  Maybe I have weird
|>friends.  
|
|I have a C compiler, but I only have 512K of mem, so it's practically
|worthless to me. But wait! It's Manx C. What if some bozo posts sources
|in Lattice C or Draco or (horror of horrors) FORTH???
|
|>But wait..  If you were given a choice of having comp.sources.amiga OR
|>comp.binaries.amiga but not both, which would *you* choose?
|
|Binaries, for the reason above.
|
|>Which is more educational?
|
|Source, of course. There are two problems, though. Most sources are not very
|educational. And of course, there is the assumption that I want to be
|educated. I want the groups cause I want good free software, not because I
|want to be educated about Amiga programming.
|
|So there's an opposing viewpoint.
|
|Sean
|-- 
|***  Sean Casey                        sean@ms.uky.edu,  sean@ukma.bitnet
|***  The Empire select() Monster       {backbone|rutgers|uunet}!ukma!sean
|***  ``I'm not gonna mail it, YOU mail it. I'M not gonna mail it... Hey! Let's
|***  send it to Rutgers! Yeah! They won't mail it. They return everything.''

OK, now that that's been said (again)...

     Louis does not have weird friends.  He has friends who can afford to buy
C compilers for their computers.  Well, all right, they may be weird, but
having compilers is not indicative of this! :-)  (Is it...?)  Of the five
people I know personally (myself included :-) ) who have Amigas, two have
compilers of some sort.  I'm one of them.  The other is a developer, so he'd
bloody well better have a compiler!  Of the four of us "ordinary" types,
that's not a very high average.  I got my compiler (Manx) about a month ago,
over six months after I bought my Ami.  If it weren't for the binaries posted
on UseNet, I'd be a lot poorer in software right now.

     I'll have to agree with Sean about the educationality (is that a word?)
of most C sources.  They are not educational.  They are not written to be
educational.  They are written to get the job done.  Of course, there are
exceptions.  Some people can write C code that is quite clear, and still be
concise and to the point.  I won't drop names, but several of them are here
on the net.

     But there's still the problem of two not quite compatable C compilers,
and (at least) two Modula-II compilers, to say nothing of Draco, Lisp,
various assemblers, etc.  I've been looking at the code for Uupc.  It seems
pretty heavily "Latticified," if you will, and I don't know what a lot of the
Lattice header file macros are.  [Aside:  *Is* there a good Lisp for Ami??]

     Then there's the cost of aquiring all this software.  Dammit, I can't
*afford* to buy all those things!  One C compiler will keep my Visa card busy
for quite a while.  My other friends are less able to buy them than I am.  Not
quite in the "starving student" catagory, but close.  Given that a lot of the
people who are buying Amigas right now are students (buying A500s), I suspect
that the percentage of people who have compilers is under 50%.  (Of course,
to play devil's advocate, I'll bet that most of the folks on the net *do*
have compilers -- probably more than one per.)

     As for the availability of binaries if they *aren't* posted...  Well, I
have no trouble with an archive server, if Pat and Co. at Purdue want to do
it that way (or Peter da Silva and his wolf do).  Ftp access is a moot point
for me, since I don't have it.  Given the high volume of the binaries group,
though, would this be a good idea from the server site's point of view? 
After all, the way things are now, they just have to post it once, and that's
that.  (Ideally, barring newsfeed hiccups.)  But if everybody who normally
collects the binaries calls in, won't they be overloaded?  I don't have
enough data to make even a halfway decent guess.  (Pat?  Somebody?)  

     Enough blathering; I've added enough to this debate.  At least it's more
interesting than the current flame war in news.groups.  Ugh.

					--dds

p.s.
     Sean:  512K is enough.  Barely, I'll admit, but it will work.  Even with
just two drives.  (The Manx manual says you can do it with one.  I suppose so,
but it sounds painful.)  If you can afford it, I'd suggest buying a third
floppy drive.  Even if you have one meg of ram, a third drive would make
things much nicer.  (I have a 2000 w/one meg, and I'd *love* to have three
drives!  Better yet, a hard disk!)  Of course, if you're in the "starving
student" class, that doesn't help much, I suppose. :-(  Sorry if that's the
case.  --dds

`````````````````````````````````````''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''
"The trackdisk's track seeks to seek | Dale D. Snell   dales@teksce.SCE.TEK.COM
to Ami's request but Ami's request   | UUCP-!: ...!tektronix!tekgen!teksce!dales
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