On 7 Apr 1999, Nathan J. Williams wrote:
> Kenneth Albanowski <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes:
>
> >
> > Well, let me pound on the other side of the ungulate for a moment: having
> > a text-compilation based UI builder (PilRC) has some massive advantages
> > over a visual one (MW Constructor), and I spent a lot of development time
> > creating such an environment for the Mac using Rez, back in the good ol'
> > days.
>
> No argument from me. But there are applications for both and
> the free development world just doesn't have the visual option.
We'll have to get that fixed.
> > Put another way: it's not very easy to use macros and manifest constants
> > in Constructor.
>
> Mmph. I've mentally refiled all preprocessor tricks under
> "terrible abomination" from "neat or useful hacks" after doing a stint
> developing automatic semantic analyzers, as well as developing in
> languages that aren't C. I suppose the rest of the C-programming world
> disagrees with me, though.
Oh, I only used preprocessor tricks because they were the only tricks
available. Try creating at least six different forms that all look
identical in some respects -- and then tuning them -- without some way of
distributing a single variable definition to all the forms. The obvious
alternative was shifting controls around at run time, but by doing the
preprocessing in Rez, the result was still visible and modifiable in
Constructor (or, then, ResEdit), if you had the inclination.
--
Kenneth Albanowski ([EMAIL PROTECTED], CIS: 70705,126)
