Using PostScript as a General Purpose Computing Language

Obsolete? Nonsense! VisualBasic is cutting edge. Only a fool would learn C and C++. As for OpenBasic, nobody wants or takes that substandard GPL shit seriously. Once you get your feet wet you should try your hand at M204.

Rita

I can live with that.

Rita

Cutting edge? Nonsense! VisualBasic is obsolete. These days it is foolish not to learn C and C++. As for OpenBasic, all the really good programmers are going in the GPL direction and OpenBasic is just the next logical step. Once you get your feet wet, you should try your hand at writing s "bash script".

If you like objects, you can also use Borland Pascal. The resulting programs can be nearly as fast as C with the run time checking of Pascal.

No, sorry, I'm allergic to abstraction. My favorite control structure is GOTO.

John

Apparently you missed all the bit about radio dials and log scales and the circular versions thereof...

If you are creating art use a graphics package. If what you are creating is most easily described with math, use a programming language.

I must admit when I did things like this I did not do the actual calcuation in postscript, I merely used postrcipt as an X-Y plotter syntax with real-world units that I could easily have my program output in. But then I only did a quick experiment, to see if the resolution of the laser printer on hand was sufficient (was trying to print rotary encoder scales) which it was not.

I do remember years ago an article about using the Apple lasewriter as a math coprocessor - allegedly it was for a brief time a faster computational engine than anything then availabe in the Macintosh computer line.

...wonders, including make PCB layouts or converting from/to Gerber, or ...

Yes, there are some rich people around...

Would take longer; once a given graphic is described in PostScript, it can easily and *quickly* be re-sized, stretched, rotated, flipped colored, etc & etc.

Based on the latest C# offerings i reckon MS is set to dump Visual BAsic.

I disagre with both. These days it is foolish not to learn java/c#. Unless you want a redundant job.

You dont know what you are missing :P

I don't know of any graphics program where one can parameterize the graphics. For example in the 6E5 example I can set the number of wedges, their spacing, the width and spacing of the lines, the radius of the turns, the size of the pads, their distance from the glass edge. And automatically generate separate masks for the various layers, at the different amounts of indenting of each mask required by the various LCD vendors..

In the radio dial example, one could, if so desired, look up the call letters of stations in your area and place them on the dial, and generate call-letter labels for the pushbuttons. Automatically.

I don't think you can do that even in the latest Photoshop beta.

Real programmers use

copy con myprog.arj

If you really want to write your own paycheck learn Fortran and Cobol. There are still a lot of desparate companies with such software.

I learned Java. I don't really like the language. They had the chance to make a clean start but copied some of the mistakes from C and C++. They pass simple types as value but complex types are only handled as references. You can't tell if a function changes a parameter's value by inspecing the call.

tWhoKnows MyFunction(tAnother A){ A++; return A; }

X = 0;

Y = MyFunction(X);

if (X>0) printf("did this print?");

I also found Java to be a write once run nowhere language. Anything that used swing wouldn't work across platforms. This is exactly what swing was supposed to do.

The 68000 in the LaserWriter made a jim dandy "mother's little helper" for the 6502 in the hose Apple IIe.

In article , John Larkin wrote: [....]

Can you do function pointers in Power Basic? I think you'd really like them.

I like the fact that it really is a "pass by value" language.

Well.. the acrobat used to be a nice program. But recently it's becoming slow loading bloatware, hang the computer for 30 seconds while I check for updates, etc all by itself. And this is true with different versions on different computers.

I don't think this is a problem with the file format, and another viewer might solve it - but it is increasingly a substantial annoyance.

Foxit Reader!

--DF