d. collins wrote:
Not only [has Coda not] made this promise [of backwards write compatibility], but they have always implied the contrary, as confirmed by the interviews I read. That's precisely my point. Of course, such a feature adds to the complexity of the program, but I recall Tobias saying this would even be doable with a plug-in, so it can't be that much of problem.
I don't know how much of a problem it would be, either, and I don't remember Tobias writing this, but if he did, I know just enough about programming and software design that it is simpler to write a plug-in to strip out later features, than to build software to have the capability to do it or not to do it.
As for the size of the software, I find this a rather amusing argument considering the rest of your post on the size of hard disks and on the necessity of keeping several versions of Finale... Or were you joking?
This is partly a matter of comparing apples and oranges. The standard size of hard drives has increased ten fold in about three years and about ten fold in the three years before that. In 1999, a 1 GB hard drive was immense. Furthermore, six years ago, the size of memory available for operating systems and softare use was probably 100 times smaller than is commonplace today.
Second, it is my experience that doubling the size of a software program squares the complexity of programming (and more importantly, debugging it), so that I submit that adding backwards write compatibility would be adding orders of magnitude more difficulty in debugging and maintaining it.
Comparing the new, bigger capacity hard drives, with the increase program size, is a bit like comparing the addition of a new filing cabinet, with writing a longer essay, in that both adding the larger hard drive, and the new filing cabinet are trivial compared with developing a larger computer program, or writing a longer essay.
ns _______________________________________________ Finale mailing list [email protected] http://lists.shsu.edu/mailman/listinfo/finale
