Re: xyW3 xpl memory etc

[TBaehr@xxxxxxxx]

Well!
Robert and Annie are at it again.

Look, XPL of either flavor is hard to understand, hard to read, hard to
maintain. It looks easy to some of us who struggled mightily with it and have
acquired bragging rights. There's probably not a single XPL routine that
couldn't be improved and/or pared. I've written some pretty nifty stuff that
functioned well, but I could open an Italian restaurant with the spaghetti
code that made some of it work. As an untrained programmer, I was ecstatic
just to get it to run. And lest any of us gets a swelled head over our own
programming prowess, especially me, Kenny informed me recently that *not one
line* of what I wrote for Xyquest/TTG (most of it for Xy4DOS) has survived in
SmartWords. I don't know if it was bad code, useless (to SmartWords or
Windows) functionality, or if the whole of XPL has been replaced by Visual
Basic. Kenny was pretty steamed about something else, and explanations would
have dulled the intended impact of his statement.

I learned a whole lot about tight (or at least tighter) coding at Xyquest
under Doug Kramer, but that was reflected mostly in the later stuff I wrote.
So pass the sauce, the spaghetti's still there.

Can we agree that we'll help each other with our XPL and take each other to
task only when we've achieved the Nirvana of perfect code?

Tim Baehr
tbaehr@xxxxxxxx