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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