Xref: utzoo comp.sys.mac:19360 comp.sys.mac.programmer:2109 Path: utzoo!utgpu!water!watmath!clyde!att!osu-cis!tut.cis.ohio-state.edu!bloom-beacon!husc6!endor!singer From: singer@endor.harvard.edu (Rich Siegel) Newsgroups: comp.sys.mac,comp.sys.mac.programmer Subject: Re: LSP 2.0 Keywords: features editor Message-ID: <5131@husc6.harvard.edu> Date: 17 Aug 88 13:42:40 GMT References: <450@umn-d-ub.D.UMN.EDU> <5116@husc6.harvard.edu> <11864@steinmetz.ge.com> Sender: news@husc6.harvard.edu Reply-To: singer@endor.UUCP (Rich Siegel) Organization: Symantec/THINK Technologies, Bedford, MA Lines: 61 In article <11864@steinmetz.ge.com> desdemona!vita@steinmetz.UUCP (Mark F. Vita) writes: >then proceeding to screw up the formatting. Perhaps you could explain >this? It seems to me what no matter what I say, those who hate the pretty printer will continue to say "It sucks, Lightspeed Pascal needs to be redesigned without the pretty printer, I don't like the way it formats", and so on. But I'll try to explain. The pretty printer is not a central design feature in and of itself. It's merely a reflection of the internals. The program text is not stored as text; instead, there is an internal representation that contains the information that's normally contained textually in the source files. The direct result of this is that the text you see in an editing window isn't text; it's the outward manifestation of this internal representation. As you type the text in, the incremental compiler tokenizes it and translates to this internal form, and the pretty-printer then displays the text. This is why it's impossible to tell the pretty-printer to do nothing. The internal form does have its advantages. Since the text i incrementally tokenized, compilation happens much faster. Also, the debugger relies on the information contained in this internal form. Since you saw Pascal demo'd at MacWorld, I assume you also saw the new LightsBug, right? That would be extremely difficult to do without this internal form. Likewise for the Instant and Observe windows. Part of the reason this is all done tis way is historical: Macintosh Pascal is based on almost exactly the same internal form, and when Lightspeed Pascal was being created, it was a a logical choice to continue to use this form. If it's any comfort, some of us here at THINK consider the internal form to be a pain; it's tough to maintain, for one thing. Sometime in the future, it's going away, but not soon enough to please the people who hate the prettyprinter. Also: based on the people I talked to at MacWorld, more people liked the pretty-printer than hated it, and it's more than an even split - a large majority liked it. It's just that the people who don't like it bitch louder... Now that I've given an explanation of why the pretty-printer is there, I am going to waste no more of my time and no more of the net's bandwidth arguing with people who don't like it. -Rich Rich Siegel Quality Assurance Technician THINK Technologies Division, Symantec Corp. Internet: singer@endor.harvard.edu UUCP: ..harvard!endor!singer Phone: (617) 275-4800 x305