Warp wrote:
> David H. Burns <dhb### [at] cherokeetelnet> wrote:
>> it was *very* useful at work and at play! And by it, I learned that even 
>> I can program,
> 
>   No offence, but I think that's one of the big problems: So many people
> *think* that they know how to program because they have written some simple
> scripts with BASIC or whatever, and then clueless employers hire them based
> solely on the fact that they *claim* they know how to program, after which
> you get horrible programs which are huge, full of kludges, full of bugs and
> basically unmaintainable.
> 
>   You just have to read TheDailyWTF to see actual examples.
> 
Ah, maybe this little monkey should just snope away and play in his own 
tree and
not bother the *real* men at work. ;)

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David H. Burns <dhb### [at] cherokeetelnet> wrote:
> Warp wrote:
> > David H. Burns <dhb### [at] cherokeetelnet> wrote:
> >> it was *very* useful at work and at play! And by it, I learned that even 
> >> I can program,
> > 
> >   No offence, but I think that's one of the big problems: So many people
> > *think* that they know how to program because they have written some simple
> > scripts with BASIC or whatever, and then clueless employers hire them based
> > solely on the fact that they *claim* they know how to program, after which
> > you get horrible programs which are huge, full of kludges, full of bugs and
> > basically unmaintainable.
> > 
> >   You just have to read TheDailyWTF to see actual examples.
> > 
> Ah, maybe this little monkey should just snope away and play in his own 
> tree and
> not bother the *real* men at work. ;)

  That kind of mocking attitude isn't really helpful.

-- 
                                                          - Warp

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Neeum Zawan wrote:

>     I wonder when such editors came around. Ever since I used BASIC, 
> there was the RENUM command. Of course, I _started_ using BASIC long, 
> long after its invention.
> 

Me to some of these guys must be _old_!

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"David H. Burns" <dhb### [at] cherokeetelnet> wrote:
> What's "plonk"? Or maybe I don't won't to know. ;)

WIYF - Wikipedia is your friend ;)

--------
Plonk is a Usenet jargon term for adding a particular poster to one's kill file
such that the poster's future postings are completely ignored. It was first
used in 1989 and by 1994[1] was a commonly used term on Usenet regarding kill
file additions.

The word is an example of onomatopoeia, intended to humorously represent the
supposed sound[2] of the user hitting the kill file. It is also sometimes given
as an acronym standing for Please Log Off, Net Kook, though this is likely a
backronym. Other used expressions are "put lamer on killfile" [3] and Please
Leave Our Newsgroup: Killfile!
--------

Not really polite unless the other party is really gone out of control (in which
case it's not polite either, just a good deal more adequate).

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clipka wrote:

> Unfortunately not - I started my computing career no earlier than in the
> mid-80s, after having seen (and toyed around with) a C64 somewhere; and I
> wasn't older than 12 back then.

Fortunately perhaps. The Commodore PET was one of those desk tops with
a built in monitor. It had, I guess, a 16K ROM and 16K of RAM. (That's 
K) and
programs we stored on a cassette tape.
> 
>> If I remember right, the QuickBASIC and QuickC
>> IDE's were models of what a good simple IDE should be. Microsoft was
>> good in those days!
> 
> They're not bad these days either. It's just that the typical scale of
> applications and desired UI paradigm has changed a lot.
>

In those days MS wasn't trying to hog the market (or lacked the 
resources to try),
didn't have a monopoly, and didn't rely on advertising hype for sales. 
And they hadn't
come up with idea of letting their users. Today I avoid everything 
Microsoft that I
can. To my regret, I let price influence me to by another Windows 
machine about a
year ago. I've kicked myself ever since!


>> Yes access to Windows graphic functions seem unnecessarily complicated and
>> poorly documented. I can't see any good reason for this.
> 
> As for being poorly documented, I'm not sure. Might be one of those cases of
> documentation written for people already familiar with the concepts. As for
> unnecessarily complicated, I'm quite sure this was originally due to
> performance constraints in the advents of GUIs, and later due to compatibility
> issues.

What you say maybe true. Also writing good documentation may be a difficult
poorly paid, and thankless task.

> Turbo Pascal - and I think Turbo C/C++ as well - did not use hard-coded routines
> to access graphics, but proprietary graphics card driver ("BGI" = "Borland
> Graphocs Interface") modules, in order actually access the graphics hardware.
> There were drivers at least for CGA, EGA, Hercules, 16-color VGA, and IBM
> 8514/A, and there was also some 3rd-party 256-color VGA driver available for
> the famous "Mode 13h".
> 
> I wouldn't be too surprised if people found a way to provide a BGI driver that
> could open a window of a particular size and use it as a canvas. Heck, I even
> personally wrote a driver for the SuperVGA modes of my own Trident TVGA 8900
> card (except for the blitting operations which I found I didn't need) =B) 

I have several graphics "packages" which use the "Mode 13h" but programs 
compiled
with them, even pre-compiled examples don't work with XP (and I suspect 
the graphics
card I have is also incompatible). The graphics routines in John Beales 
wonderful
heightfield programs don't work, though the rest of the program does.


>> No, but it's fascinating, and in my little experience addictive.
> 
> Don't get *too* addicted to it - it has some bad habits, and its own share of
> being frowned upon :P

I didn't and there's no danger of it now, but I can see how it might be 
easy.
> 
> 

:)David

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Neeum Zawan wrote:

>     I can sympathize with David. As a kid, graphics was one of the fun 
> things about BASIC/QuickBasic. 

I'm still kid and hope to remain one eternally. But in the work I did in 
science
and engineering,graphical and image displays were almost essential!

> 
  No book I picked up covered what I thought should be straightforward: 
How do I
color a pixel on the screen.

Yes!! My experience exactly, except that I have never found out how to 
plot a pixel colored
or not on XP. (It was easy enough in DOS). But it can be done, is done, 
all the time. Pov-Ray
does, but so far I haven't been able to find anyone who can tell me how.
> 
>     I didn't have Internet access, nor did I know anyone who knew much 
> programming, so no one pointed me to better ways to do graphics in C, 
> nor was I aware of other languages where it may be easier.

I haven't been able to find it on the internet either.

David

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Neeum Zawan <m.n### [at] ieeeorg> wrote:
>  I wonder when such editors came around. Ever since I used BASIC, there
> was the RENUM command. Of course, I _started_ using BASIC long, long
> after its invention.

IIRC one of the main factors of BASIC's popularity - the all-time famous C-64 -
did *not* have a "RENUM" command.

The first computer *I* used, the Amstrad CPC, *did* - hehe :P

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Warp wrote:
> Neeum Zawan <m.n### [at] ieeeorg> wrote:
>>         I think that's what kept me and many away from "serious" languages like 
>> C/C++ for a long time. No book I picked up covered what I thought should 
>> be straightforward: How do I color a pixel on the screen. Doing graphics 
>> seemed to be a lot more complicated.
> 
>>         I didn't have Internet access, nor did I know anyone who knew much 
>> programming, so no one pointed me to better ways to do graphics in C, 
>> nor was I aware of other languages where it may be easier.
> 
>   It's funny that even today graphics in C/C++ development (and in fact quite
> many other languages) is a difficult issue.
> 
>   What makes it ironic is that a large part of C/C++ programs out there are
> heavily graphical (most prominently the computer games), and seems like
> everybody just somehow manages to get the graphics done, but when you ask
> for a simple way of getting graphics, they will usually shrug and say that
> it's a bit complicated... (Because it *is* a bit complicated.)

If it is (and I can't believe that it's all that complicated), why is it??

> 
> 
>   Immediately when you started having different users with different
> hardware setups, the whole graphics programming stumbled on a huge problem.
> 
Maybe, but why are the graphics for Windows itself so complicated? It's a
single operating system running mainly on similar hardware. And again 
Pov-Ray does
it for images at lease. How does it do it? So it's complicated, even 
*hard*, surely
someone knows how it is done and can tell me, or tell me where to find 
out. *That*
was my original question on the programming news group which led to my 
original
post in this thread. Of course, the thread has been fun --and 
informative. :)

I've run on past suppertime! ;)

David


David

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Neeum Zawan <m.n### [at] ieeeorg> wrote:
>  I can sympathize with David. As a kid, graphics was one of the fun
> things about BASIC/QuickBasic. For someone new to programming, there are
> a lot of things you can do using language concepts with graphics, and
> it's a lot more interesting than writing a silly calculator program.

Yeah, I know what you're talking about (although it was Turbo Pascal for me
later, which fortunately did have 2D pixel graphics, almost as easy as the
BASIC for my homecomputer).

>  I think that's what kept me and many away from "serious" languages like
> C/C++ for a long time. No book I picked up covered what I thought should
> be straightforward: How do I color a pixel on the screen. Doing graphics
> seemed to be a lot more complicated.

When I was learning C, there was a project I really wanted to do that required
2D graphics output. But how to? I had access to both Windows and Unix machines,
but I had not the slightest clue where to start researching how to do graphics
output on either Windows or X.

Fortunately, I happened to know a bit about the PostScript printer language - so
guess what I did :P

(I later went to save some paper and toner though by going for GhostScript for
test runs ;))

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Warp <war### [at] tagpovrayorg> wrote:
>   Immediately when you started having different users with different
> hardware setups, the whole graphics programming stumbled on a huge problem.

Yup. DOS times were even worse than nowadays, as there was no accepted standard
interface to graphics cards at all (except for standard CGA/EGA/VGA modes,
which later graphics cards tried their best to remain hardware compatible
with); so essentially each program came with its own proprietary set of
graphics drivers, which fully supported only a selection of SuperVGA graphics
cards available - and new graphics cards in turn would come with disks
providing graphics drivers for only the most popular graphics-hungry
applications.

High-quality graphics games in the VGA/SuperVGA era would almost invariably run
in the famous VGA mode 13h (320x200 pixels at 256 colors) anyway, which worked
fine on virtually all SuperVGA graphics cards, but didn't really max them out
of course.

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