From: oahvenla@snakemail.hut.fi (Osma Ahvenlampi)
Subject: Re: Programming
Organization: Helsinki University of Technology, Finland
	<OAHVENLA.92Nov15135840@lk-hp-4.hut.fi>
	<njale.32.721995806@dhhalden.no>
Date: Tue, 17 Nov 1992 17:57:26 GMT

(I'm doing this AGAIN! Why?)

In article <njale.32.721995806@dhhalden.no> njale@dhhalden.no (NJAL EIDE) writes:

(this is from my earlier post)
>>it, but that's because there are already some very powerful spreadsheets out
>>there. Show me an AMOS spreadsheet.. I have seen HyperCard based games that
>>beat AMOS games easily.

>No, you have NOT. Maybe you have seen some intricate puzzle-games, but 
>anything wich incorporate moving graphics is dead slow with Hypercard (I'm 
>not meaning flip-frame animations). In fact, anything is dead slow with 
>Hypercard. I've been using it with a 20 mhz Mac IIsi and I would say that a 
>humble A500 with Amos blows it miles away (Hypercard, not the Mac). F.ex. 
>recently I wrote a little program that should simulate the trajectory of an 
>arrow. It took into consideration gravity and the angle and power at wich 
>the arrow was shot. The arrow was a simple polygon of two - 2 - points, but 
>still, when I was moving it above a muliti-colored bit-map, it used nearly 
>two seconds a frame. I could go on-and-on telling how dreadfully slow 
>Hypercard is. I'm not an expert at it. A more experienced Hypercard-user 
>could probably speed up things a little bit, but then again I'm not an 
>expert at Amos either, and here animating objects is quite fast. I'm sure I'
>m not taking my mouth to full when I say about 50, yes fifty, times faster 
>at moving objects. It probably is even more.

Anyone who knows HyperCard wouldn't try animations with it. It's not created
for that. There are lots of games that don't need animation, and I'd take
one of them any day over an AMOS shoot'em or whatever. In fact, over just
about any shoot'em.

>>Oh, well that tells something about you. If you think lots of commands make
>>a language powerful, boy, are you lost... You said that C is a good language.
>>Well, C has 32 commands. That twice too many, I'd say.

>Why are you so ignorant ? Off course it's better to have many commands. You 
>don't have to use them if you think you could write better routines 
>yourself, but it's very, very nice to have them. And what you say about C is 
>not true in practice. Every single C-compiler comes with a large set of 
>include-routines, but let me guess, you never use them. 

The more instructions, the more there is to remember, and the more restrictive
the use of any single instruction is. A large base instruction set is not a
strenght. Subroutine librarys is not the same thing. You can choose what
library, if any, you want to use, or write a better one if you can.
There is not a one routine in C includes. Only descriptions about the basic
C routines found in the linkable libraries, and in the case of Amiga,
extensively about the system calls.

>>Seems like you didn't get it. LoadIFF is probably bug free, but there are
>>commands in AMOS that are not. Suppose LoadIFF had a bug, like thrashing the
>>picture, if it was size 319x76. Now, you command syntax is correct, where the
>>hell is the bug?

>Suppose this, suppose that. It's working, so where the hell is your problem ?

No, it isn't. If it is, you could do a OS 2.0 Commodity with AMOS. Do it, and
I'll take my every word against AMOS back.

>>On your assembly (I think that was what you meant) program the bug would be
>>spotted automatically by the compiler. There is no instruction "Move A.x".

>Wich compiler would spot a missing 'Move' ? FutureSofts compiler with 
>artificial intelligence.

No compiler would spot a missing Move. Nor would AMOS spot a missing LoadIFF
for that matter.

>And why couldn't you use iff.lib from AMOS ? Or why couldn't you write your 
>own LoadIFF in Amos ?

You could use any library from AMOS, yes. Forgetting for a moment that you'd
have to either use the offsets or write your own defines (AMOS doesn't have
#DEFINE (meaning a constant), does it?), even if you did use libraries for
everything (which would make using AMOS harder than using assembler, not to
mention C), you couldn't get rid of the AMOS run-time library, which is the
thing that makes all serious AMOS use an impossibility.

>You should be careful of judging other peoples capabilities. Especially when 
>you don't know them. You sure don't sound to experienced to me. You sound 
>exactly like a guy who think he's something special, since he know something 
>about coding. Everybody else are lamers, right ? But, I really shouldn't 
>write that. For all I know, you could be the one behind Real-3d.

Well, I'm not. Does that make you feel better? I don't care what you say about
my abilities, they don't change from that.

>C is not easy. C is easy for you and me, because we have gotten the hang of 
>it. Other languages, such as Amos, HyperCard etc. are easy. But they are not 
>as powerfull and flexible. But I would prefer to write a game in Amos. You 
>would get away with it in C if you included some assembly routines. With 
>Amos that is not needed.

All really powerful languages are easy, because that makes them powerfu|.
Unfortunately, easy languages don't compile well on Von Neumann machines..
C isn't hard. 

>>And if you want to play a MED file?

>Then you play a MED-file. AmosPro supports just that. I'm getting tired of 
>this. You don't obviouly know as much about Amos as you belive you do.

Great. AMOS Pro supports MED files. What about FutureComposer. If I release
tomorrow THE music editor, which unfortunately must have a TOTALLY different
module format to get rid of the limitations of other formats (not that I am,
ever, as I don't know a shit about music), AMOS Pro definitely won't support
it. Every assembler or C compiler or whatever good language that supports
linking subroutines would. AMOS might support it two years from now, when
they get around to add it to their run-time library, which, by that point,
is over 300KB long.

This will definitely be the last post by me to this thread. I'll put it in
my kill file right now to avoid temptation.

alt.sys.amiga.demos is in the newsgroups, because I think that's where this
thread started from... .advocacy I don't read.
--
Osma Ahvenlampi  -  oahvenla@snakemail.hut.fi   * Workstation power for micro-
All my opinions are not necessarily really mine * computer price: Amiga := FUN
Xref: sparky alt.sys.amiga.demos:1690 comp.sys.amiga.applications:8736 comp.sys.amiga.introduction:1554