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On Wed, 28 Jun 2000, Big Ed wrote:

> Actually that's a pretty good idea.  One of the things that is going to have 
> to happen is people are going to have to learn yet another scripting 
> language to create macros/etc., but if you can use a VBS clone, that will 
> make the transition CONSIDERABLY easier.  But please remember to restrict 
> the ever-living mess out of the VB clone to avoid macro virii.

I would finally like to weigh in on the VB question with the view that I
hope never to be associated with a product involving the unmitigated
agony that is BASIC (and esp VB).  In my opinion, the only langauages that
I have seen that are worse (for general programming) are COBOL and Fortran
(and I don't know much about either, so they might grow on me).  I agree
with Paul that the world only needs one word processor. And I don't know
if I could sleep at night, if I helped make the world's dominant word
processor a vehicle for one of the world's worst programming languages.  

As I have said, I would prefer Scheme.  Scheme is easy to learn (it has
almost no syntax rules) and encourages good programming and is fun.  I
don't neccessarily think this means we should us Guile (which might well
be overkill).  But I imagine there will be violent opposition to any
LISP-derivative.  So I would settle for a nice, easy to learn, cleanly
structured language such as Python.  Or a complex, difficult to learn
language such as C++.  Or even Ada.  But please, not BASIC.  

> 
> Also, I haven't taken a look at all on how Abiword displays text, but what 
> would need to take place to anti-alias the fonts?  I know this is probably 
> beating a dead penguin, but I'm just curious where the anti-aliasing would 
> need to take place. (Abiword, Gnome, X, etc...)

Anti-aliasing is traditionally thought of as a job for X (although it
could be done anywhere, if we were to write it).  Its lack is often
thought to be a major weakness in X.  

           
                                sam th               
                                [EMAIL PROTECTED]
                                http://www.abisource.com/~sam/
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