Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!lll-winken!lll-lcc!ames!mailrus!tut.cis.ohio-state.edu!cs.utexas.edu!sdcrdcf!trwrb!scgvaxd!ashtate!dbase!awd
From: awd@dbase.UUCP (Alastair Dallas)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.mac.programmer
Subject: Re: Resource Manager (was Design Philosophy)
Summary: Real World is more expedient
Keywords: resources
Message-ID: <405@dbase.UUCP>
Date: 5 Jul 88 21:29:11 GMT
References: <434@dogie.edu> <7146@cit-vax.Caltech.Edu>
Organization: Ashton Tate Development Center Glendale Cal.
Lines: 28


If you're writing a "real" Mac application, you want to end up with all of
your string literals as resources, for translation.  Likewise, people have
come to expect that your menus will be resources, as well, for command-key
customization.  Last-minute tweaking is really much easier with ResEdit
than with many full re-compiles.

But just because you want to end up that way, doesn't mean it should be 
that way from the start.  Many things are easier to do inline at first, to
speed up turnaround time--to get something working quicker.  Then, when
you're real proud of yourself, take a day and strip out everything you can
into resources.  This is similar to the custom MDEF debate described in the
great "Tear-Off Menu" article in MacTutor recently.  The authors explain
that Apple wants you to compile MDEFs as separate projects that create
code resources that you link with your main project.  The problem is that
this is a real pain when you're first debugging, so the authors explain a
way to get around this and leave the code in your main project until
you're sure it works.

The IBM-PC trend is toward resource file concepts, by the way.  I just got
a C library called "C-Worthy" from the Programmer's Shop which includes
facilities for creating and maintaining separate resource files of string
literals simply for ease of translation and last minute editing.  Without
getting specific, I think I can say that we lean toward this approach on
dBASE IV.  So tell your friend that this is not what the preprocessor is
for.  Turning your back on any facility that the target machine provides
is definately not "real world."

/alastair/