>Call me old fashion (I'm only 30!) but I believe a tool vendor should ship a
>product with appropriate peripherals and should expect customers to use
>those peripherals. I once saw my kid brother hammering a screw into a
>board. He explained why saying the screws were in the drawer next to the
>hammer. Don't ship the MSL and the PalmOS headers in the same package if
>they shouldn't be used together. You end up with inflammatory idiots like
>myself trying to shoot themselves in the foot.
But what about the other point of view? What about the developers who want to
use MSL and who can work around the problems involved with trying to do so?
Should you prevent them from a possibly valuable tool? I think that Metrowerks
has a tricky decision whether or not to include MSL.
In the case of your brother, I guess the solution that comes immediately to mind
is to move the hammer and screws away from each other. By analogy, Metrowerks
should make MSL seperately downloadable. But where do you draw the line? What
other tools are potentially dangerous and should be seperately downloadable?
And what kind of pain does that cause to the developers who need to scrounge for
all those pieces and download them. And who then have to determine if those
pieces are compatible with each other?
Back to your brother again, another solution might be just to teach him what
tools are used for what purpose. Education is the key! Here is a quote from
PAL090_Support.fm.html, which comes with CodeWarrior for Palm OS:
"Metrowerks Standard Libraries (MSL), which provide ANSI-standard library
routines for C and C++ programming, are not yet available for use with PalmOS."
And in CWPalmOSFAQ.html:
"4.5 Can I use ANSI C (or C++) standard libraries on device?"
"Use of ANSI C/C++ libraries on device is not presently supported. Metrowerks
plans to add limited Palm OS support to MSL (Metrowerks Standard Library, our
standard ANSI C and C++ library implementation) in a future release..."
"Please bear in mind that even after MSL supports Palm OS, extensive use of
standard library functions will likely be discouraged..."
-- Keith
