Re: Genera presentations, etc.

[Brad Miller <miller@CS.ROCHESTER.EDU>]

    Date: Thu, 16 Feb 89 13:21 EST
    From: pvs@JAZZ.alcoa.com (Peter Van Sickel)

I have to agree that the presentation system is very nice. It certainly
allowed us to put a very functional front end on our system that is far, far
ahead of what we have given a comparable investment on the TI-Explorer.

The only minus is (of course) compatibility; we need to "deliver" this
system on other machines (explorers, suns, etc.) and still end up having to
write custom interfaces. What I'd like to see is presentations -> clx
translation that would do this work for us... (we actually have an undergrad
working on this now (for the subset of the presentations we use), but I don't
expect him to finish anytime soon...)

Alas, there is always a feature/compatibility tradeoff, but given that
Symbolics corporate direction *seems* to be toward providing the best
*development* environments (and that's where I want to see it too), the
implication is that more tools are needed to download to minimally
configured *delivery* environments, e.g. KCL on a 3-b2 :-).

I withdraw this concept when ivory plug in boards run as fast as their
hosts (e.g. if I plug it in to a Sun-4), and cost about $300. Since I don't
*think* Symbolics wants to be in that business...

----
Brad Miller		U. Rochester Comp Sci Dept.
miller@cs.rochester.edu {...allegra!rochester!miller}