Joseph Ayers wrote:
May I put in a vote for short (UCSD Pascal) string support. I'm trying to revive several legacy programs based on the Think Pascal, Codewarrior development environments. See:
http://rsb.info.nih.gov/nih-image/ for an example.
Based on my experience so far, I'd say that 80% of the conversion effort has been dealing with lack of short string support. Concat being a prime culprit with variable argument lists requiring major hand coded efforts.. The legacy code base in these environments is legion in the academic arena.
I see. (BTW, a quick, though not really nice, workaround for Concat might be just to provide Concat2, Concat3, etc., as many as needed, that do the conversions. Then the main code would only need inserting a number on each call, which could be removed again quite automatically later ...)
Peter N Lewis wrote:
In any event, as I said up front, I'm not intending to advocate that short strings are wonderful or that there aren't any other alternatives, or any such thing - I love the long string support in GPC, it more than made up from the short term pain of conversion. What I am saying is that it is turning away people with traditional Mac code to port before they get a chance to find out how cool GPC is.
OK. BTW, I wasn't saying that short strings are evil, just really trying to find out how they're used and needed (as I wrote in the other mail, for former BP programmers such as myself, the issues were much smaller).
Frank