ADDITIONAL INFORMATION /or COMMENTS:

PORTING from page 4

be able to do even simple things you

have to know a lot from each of those

five volumes, so the problem is that

there’s no way to get in a little bit at a

time. It’s like being thrown into the

middle of the ocean.

So if you’ve ever memorized War

and Peace you probably won’t have

any problem.

DF: I think that’s not a bad com-

ment. I would say that doing this Mac

product was for me the most difficult

intellectual exercise since I was in

graduate school. I think everyone

here would agree.

I should add that along the way we

were fortunate enough to pick up a

ringer, a fellow named Marty Sedluk

who happened to be a Mac zealot.

He was very useful; first, because he

was very familiar with the Toolbox,

and second, because he would argue

with us about whether things were or

weren’t Mac-like, and that was of

great assistance, too.

Believe me, if you haven’t con-

tacted the Mac zealots, you haven’t

lived. It’s literally a secular religion,

and they are deadly serious. They’ve

forgotten it’s a computer program

somewhere along the line.

Aside from the difficulties in-

volved in learning how to use the

Toolbox effectively, did you en-

counter other frustrations during

the port process that were tied to the

design of the Mac?

DF: Not to the design of the Mac

hardware, but the architecture of the

Mac system. We started with the idea

that we’d sort of”Mac-ize” FoxBASE

a little bit, but not turn our applica-

tion inside out.

Let me explain what I mean by

that. As Bill hinted, the Mac requires

you to be event-driven; that is, every-

thing responds to external events,

which is the exact reverse of the way

you normally program on the DOS

side. These events, moreover, hap-

pen somewhat asynchronously, so the

architecture of a Mac application

typically is centered around a single

event-processing loop, and the entire

system is driven by events that are

picked, which is more or less the in-

verse of what you’re accustomed to in

the DOS environment.

We started off with the idea we’d

do a minimum of that, and, bit by bit,

kicking and screaming, with great

pain, we were forced, item by item, to

turn our product inside out. And

once it’s inverted it’s never going

back. In fact, the Mac product

source would be the mother source

for all of our future products.

So we will be emulating the event-

driven environment even in a charac-

ter-driven DOS. For one thing, that

particular configuration of a program

is far more amenable to take ad-

vantage of multi-threading in OSt2,

for instance. So you respond to

asynchronous external events and it’s

in that formal set-up that you do that.

continued on page 7

LA. FOX