Re: Pictures in source code

[ramon_felciano@summit.stanford.edu (Ramon Felciano)]

In article <1991Dec10.165825.17920@midway.uchicago.edu>, mcdougal@cs.uchicago.edu (Tom McDougal) writes:
> 
> "A picture is worth a thousand words," so the saying goes.
> Here is number 1 on my Xmas wish-list for almost every programming 
> environment: the ability to combine pictures with source code, 
> especially for documentation.  Do other people wish for this, too?
> 
> Just as MS Word treats PICs as characters, I'd like to be able
> to write a comment containing a picture:
> 
> ;;;  <pic goes here>  (in lisp)
> 
> or
> 
> (* <pic goes here> *)  (in pascal)
> 
> You get the idea.
> 
> I have thought of using something like Nissus, which stores pictures
> and formatting info in the resource fork, leaving the data fork as
> pure (executable) text, but it's generally preferable to stay within
> the programming environment.
> 
> I suppose this is a difficult thing to implement, or it would have
> appeared already, but I hope the programming tools gods will find
> a way to do it, Someday.
> 
> Thanks.
> 
> ------------------------------------
> Tom McDougal           mcdougal@cs.uchicago.edu 
> 
>         	1951, Roland Cleebens, football coach,
>         	calls his team together but has trouble
>         	making ends meet.
> 
> 

Hear, hear! Its ludicrous that a work environment as visually and media
rich as the Macintosh doesn't allow programmers to use the tools we've
come to expect from every other type of application (i.e. pasting a PICT,
and with the coming of QuickTime, pasting Sounds and other dynamix) in
our development environments!

Personally, I'm looking to Symantec to tackle this problem first. Even
something as simple as allowing for different text editing procedures
when editing a comment vs. editing code (why can we have our comments
word-wrap for us?!!)

Ramon M. Felciano
Associate Director, SUMMIT
Stanford University Medical Media and Information Technologies