Is Rev too "Mac focused"?

[Mark Wieder]

Chipp-

Saturday, August 7, 2004, 11:18:33 PM, you wrote:

CW> Also, as you recall at the Rev Summit in CA, Chris Bohnert demonstrated
CW> how easy it is to create an external for RR. One which can call a 
CW> Win32API if needed. So, it seems to me, an interim step would be a
CW> really good primer for creating externals for RR. 'Cause even with a
CW> WinAPI interface embedded in the language, users will still need to
CW> learn a lot to be able to use it.

I think there are two approaches to this:

First, in order to get out of the RR sandbox, a developer either has
to code an external in C or get someone else to do it for them. A
primer for how to create externals for RR needs to be aimed at
existing C programmers, teach non-C-programmers how to program in C,
or somehow do the work for them. And this is not just Windows. Mac
users wanting to create external libraries would need the same sort of
skills to make calls into the Mac OS. This isn't something every RR
developer needs, and shouldn't be.

Second, I feel that the extension of Transcript to externals has a
couple of pluses - one is that programmers coming from another
environment (MSVC for example) can make port their code over to
Transcript more easily if they have access to calls that are not
currently supported by the RR engine (and in fact the engine would
probably have no business supporting). This I think would be a big
draw towards acceptance in the Windows market. The second plus is that
given access to a standard ActiveX mechanism, RR programmers would
have a wealth of existing controls and libraries at their disposal
without having to reinvent everything from scratch. As Ken Ray has
pointed out, there are lots of grid controls and the like that exist
for C and VB programmers to pluck off the net and drop into their
applications, but that capability doesn't yet exist for RR.

-- 
-Mark Wieder
 mwieder at ahsoftware.net