From: alansar@ccs.northeastern.edu (Mohammad Al-Ansari)
Newsgroups: comp.os.ms-windows.misc
Subject: Re: ARGHH!-WFW2.0 Sucks big time!
Keywords: Crashes problems wfw
Date: 13 Oct 92 06:36:37 GMT
Organization: College of CS, Northeastern U

In article <1992Oct13.052247.6046@random.ccs.northeastern.edu> I write:
>In article <mcdonald.368@aries.scs.uiuc.edu> mcdonald@aries.scs.uiuc.edu (J. D. McDonald) writes:
>
>[...]
>
>
>>
>>
>>W4W also lacks other seriously needed features - character and
>>paragraph styles, for instance.
>
>I don't know what you mean by "character AND paragraph" styles. There
>are certainly paragraph styles. As for character styles, that is a matter
>of taste (as this whole issue actually is :). If you really need such
>styles, simply record macros for them. A small WordBasic program can
>also be written to display a menu of all such macros and let you pick
>the one you want to apply.

Oops. I spoke too fast. Please ignore what I said here. I guess I forgot to
think before I wrote this comment :) It is not that easy at all to implement
all the functionality of character styles with macros.

As for the rest of my comments, I still stand by them :)

>
>>
>>One of the biggest ... in fact, I would say THE biggest ... flaws in
>>W4W is that you can't read the intermediate files (modulo things like
>>indluded bitmaps) and can't (the topic of the original post) #include
>>other files. It is **very** possible to introduce bugs into a W4W
>>file that simply **can't** be fixed, because you can't read the file
>>and see what they are. 
>
>Could you please give some examples of such bugs? Do you intruduce those bugs
>through WFW or by modifying files with a regular text editor?  If this is the
>case then I don't see the point.
>
>>                       People knock TeX because it is a "programming
>>language". True, but W4W is too, in a sense, **and it prohibits you from
>>reading the code to find bugs**!!!!
>>
>
>>************************************************************************
>>
>>W4W is like a 
>>programming language would be if the code was "write and delete only" and
>>you could only tell if it was right  by examining the output .. 
>>no debuggers!!!  (I.e. once you wrote the code, you could never examine
>>it exactly ... only delete lines of the source without seeing them, 
>>only knowing what you intended them to do (e.g. seeing the comments).
>>
>>************************************************************************
>
>No. You don't write ANY code in WFW. You only give a description of the output
>by using some visual tools.  The "programming" you are talking about is done
>for you by WFW.  The goal of anybody who uses a word processor is to have
>output that matches his or her specifications.  WFW does exactly that and thus
>you should not complain about not being able to see the code.  It is just
>another way of doing things.  I certainly don't want to know what goes on
>behind the seens if I don't need to. Unless there is something I don't know,
>and depending on how you answer the question above, I couldn't care less about
>the code that WFW stores. I only care about the output.
>
>WFW is an interface between you and the code.  Do you object to all such
>graphical interfaces? You also should direct this criticism to all WYSIWYG
>word processors on all platforms, not only WFW.
>
>
>>
>>
>>Doug McDonald
>
>
>----------------------------------------------------------------------------
>Mohammad Al-Ansari                      | alansar@damon.ccs.northeastern.edu
>College of Computer Science             | alansar@gnu.ai.mit.edu
>Northeastern University                 | BITNET: alansar@NUHUB