Michael J. Mahon (***@aol.com) wrote:
: Dave Althoff Jr wrote:
: >Personally, I swore by GPLE and swore at Program Writer.
: I'm curious about what caused you trouble with Program Writer. It's easy
: to enter with &&, and it sets 80-column mode. I've never used it on
: anything earlier than a //e, and I seldom, if ever, use embedded inverse
: or control characters (though I think it can handle them).
I never used those, either...I thought embedding control characters was a
bit sloppy and/or lazy. All those MicroSPARC programs that had that line...
nn D$ = "" : REM THERE IS A CONTROL-D IN THERE
seemed like it was counter-productive...why not just use...
nn D$ = CHR$(4)
Anyway, I never liked Program Writer because it was based on a completely
different method of writing code than I learned to use in Applesoft. For
me, the real beauty of an interpreted BASIC is that you can instantly
pound out code, test it, pound out more, test things directly from the
command prompt, stick them into the program, and move on to something
else. Since Applesoft is program-line based, I never had much use for a
screen-based editor, and more often than not, it just got in the way.
Program Writer is good if you're a programmer who sits down, writes a
whole program, tests it, then debugs it. If you can stand to work in
Pascal, then Program Writer is probably fine. But my programming style is
better suited to GPLE.
: Frankly, I've seen very little comparative treatment of the few Applesoft
: editors, and would like to know more. Of course, there's always the
: fundamental problem with any editor comparison: whichever one you've
: used most is "best" because none of the others uses the same
: familiar command keys. ;-)
Yes, and I think preferred workflow is important as well. I always loved
programming in Applesoft because it, and a few other BASICs I've worked
with (notably Radio Shack Level II...) are interpreted and allow for
instant feedback. These days, I generally just use Apple's built-in
"editor" because that way I don't have to hunt up a disk or wait for the
editor to load. I'm not writing major applications anymore, just little
tools that are less elaborate and a lot easier to troubleshoot... 8-)
--Dave Althoff, ][.
--
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