Re: Zip V8 (Re-releasing Zip)


Tue, 21 Nov 1995 09:55:00 GMT

>>>>> "Stephen" == Stephen van Egmond <svanegmo@undergrad.math.uwaterloo.ca> writes:

> Speaking of which, is the source to that going to appear?

My guess is not. But it wouldn't be hard to implement the idea (of
saving state changes from the initial state, rather than entire
machine states), even if the files remained incompatible with Bryan's
implementation.

> If not, it's a more effective use of my time to write the
> interpreter from scratch than to decryptify the Zip code to figure
> out what needs to change to become Spec 0.2-compliant. (I haven't,
> yet.)

Bryan's interpreter wouldn't help: it's ITF based, and is probably
further from 0.2 than Zip is, although probably not very far away. It
doesn't support undo at all, for example, which would be desirable for
most implementations.

> Anyone for C++?

I'd prefer a reimplementation in C, preferably with the core of the
code #ifdefless. I don't think C++ would help significantly with
this, and it would make the code useless to many people, for example
those of us who would like to write for the Psion Series 3a, where the
languages of choice are C (and OPL), although the manuals claim that
if you happen to have TopSpeed C++, it'll probably work.

-- 
Bruce                   Institute of Advanced Scientific Computation
bruce@liverpool.ac.uk   University of Liverpool
http://supr.scm.liv.ac.uk/~bruce/