My Entry for the RR Wish List

[David Vaughan]

Although I voiced support for a CompileIt!-style product, the need is 
far less than existed in HC, as I continue to learn.

While we are floating the idea though, I envisage a separate product 
from Rev, as was CompileIt! from HC, rather than inbuilt capability. 
Why? Because no-one should fiddle with handles and pointers without 
damn-good driving lessons and background knowledge of what it is they 
are playing with. It would soon turn people off RR if they thought such 
capability a normal or expected-use part of the product and then crashed 
and burned as they over-wrote their pointers, failed to manage memory 
and struggled with low-level debugging. Hardly the RR experience we 
enjoy. Similarly, Java is productive for its safety features (no pointer 
access) as much as its cross-platform capability. Rev's avoidance of 
strong typing is itself a language strategy, appealing to some and not 
to others.

I like the idea, but as an add-on, not a product change, hence my 
support also for separate licensing for a "modest" fee.

regards
David

On Sunday, February 24, 2002, at 03:59 , Rob Cozens wrote:

>> Since it seems to be the vertical platform-specific stuff where we 
>> need the
>> most help, it may bring us the biggest bang for the buck to have some 
>> means
>> of making OS calls directly in the language.  We'd have to type our 
>> vars,
>> but that's a small price to pay for all that flexibility.
>
> Richard, et al:
>
> If it is not a major undertaking, it would be the preferred approach.  I
> was trying to leverage the concept by suggesting it could be a source of
> additional revenue to MC/RR Inc.  rather than additional cost to be
> amortized by MC/RR sales.
>
> On the surface it seems only to require variable typing (including 
> support
> for handles & pointers), ability to build & extract info from system
> parameter packets, and a built-in knowledge of the number and type of
> arguments for each system call (a la CompileIt's built-in libraries 
> and/or
> buildable by the developer).
>
> Rob Cozens
> CCW, Serendipity Software Company
>
> "And I, which was two fooles, do so grow three;
> Who are a little wise, the best fooles bee."
>
> from "The Triple Foole" by John Donne (1572-1631)
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