Path: utzoo!utgpu!watmath!clyde!att!rutgers!cbmvax!vu-vlsi!swatsun!jackiw From: jackiw@cs.swarthmore.edu (Nick Jackiw) Newsgroups: comp.sys.mac.programmer Subject: Lightspeed Pascal 2.0 Keywords: lightspeed, pascal, review, pro, con Message-ID: <2219@ilium.cs.swarthmore.edu> Date: 5 Dec 88 21:25:13 GMT Organization: Visual Geometry Project, Swarthmore College Lines: 59 I'd like to put in a few good words for Lightspeed Pascal 2.0, considering the volume of self-righteous whining that's been going on the past few weeks (but it won't write my applications FOR me...). My update arrived well before the net lead me to believe, and with little or no work I converted my projects and they work fine. A few observations: - MULTIFINDER! ALL of my development tools (Lightspeed, ResEdit, Edit/Asm, InsideMac, Word [for documentation] and the-last-built-version-of-my-app) are corresident and clustered under my Apple menu. I've been wanting this for years... - The new editor is great. Admittedly, those who were upset by the old pretty-printing won't be pleased with the new one: all of the formatting changes (and the "customizable source-code formats") are superficial. But the new cursor-key commands (which work on character, line, page, lexical, and block levels), as well as the popup menu in the title bar which lets you jump to any routine in the file, make navigation such a breeze I've all but stopped relying on hardcopy. (Printing, as far as I was concerned, was the only place the pretty-printing offended me: what a waste of paper!) - I encounter the ubiquitous "Resource not found (-192)" error frequently. I remember these from v1.0 ... the least helpful error message LSP ever produces (except for blind crashes, of course). At any rate, a frequent cause for it in my first weeks with 2.0 has been forgetting to run the library converter on my machine-language subroutine files. - Code size improvement and speed, despite net accusations to the contrary, ARE immediately tangible in commercial (i. e. no TEXT or DRAWING window) applications. One project I'm working on dropped from 180 to 170K, the other from 62 to 50 (!). Compile time is noticably faster, too. - MAJOR ANNOYANCE: Lightspeed stamps its own thumb-print on every application you build. Go into ResEdit and LO! An extra resource not in your rez-file, called--oddly enough--'LSP' (Id#2000; Size 18; locked+preload). If you zap it, you zap your application too... What's the deal with this? It seems like a completely gratuitous bit of egoism on LSP's part. The resource data is fixed (never written to), and gets loaded at the base of your globals somewhere in Code Seg 1 (or wherever your main program is...). It could just as easily be stored as constant data in the CODE seg, and referenced appropriately. Considering the licensing agreement doesn't even require the old 'portions copyright THINK technologies,' there's no reason for this sort of attitude on the part of the compiler. In situations where you want CONTROL over your application (as I assume most commercial app writers do), having LSP play with the resource manager, the heap, and so forth is unacceptable. Especially if there's no explanation other than the "oh leave that there I don't know what it does but it won't work without it" rationale. The next virus author is sure to name his or her nVIR resource as 'LSP'... Lots of other good features (conditional assembly finally offers a clean way to integrate debugging-support code; LightsBug 2 seems real nice), some bad (the new 'LINK error' window doesn't help you find what segment or source file the bad-link reference occurred in...). If LSP 3.0 offers as much of a change as 2.0, I'll keep on upgradin'. -- +-------------------++-UUCP: ...!rugers!bpa!swatsun!jackiw------------------+ | NICHOLAS JACKIW || Internet: jackiw@cs.swarthmure.edu | |("Jacques-Yves"2U!)|| Bitnet jackiw%campus.swarthmore.edu@swarthmr.bitnet | +-------------------++-VGP/MathDept/Swarthmore College, Swarthmore PA 19081-+