[E-Lang] Re: E questions

[Paul Snively]

on 7/6/01 8:52 PM, Mark S. Miller at markm@caplet.com wrote:

> Postscript's 
> success is peculiar -- it was promoted as a protocol for talking to printers
> and not as a programming language.  Despite universal adoption in this
> narrow niche, it has never spread beyond that, despite brief proprietary
> attempts by Sun and NeXT to promote it as a display/ui extension language.

Utterly trivial quibble: MacOS X's graphic architecture is now based on
Adobe's "Bravo" technology, which basically means that it's based on the
successor to Display Postscript. This finally resolves a conflict that had
long plagued Macintosh developers, namely that drawing on the screen used
one model (QuickDraw) and drawing on the printer used another (Postscript).
It also means that MacOS X developers get print-to-PDF for free.

So the introduction of MacOS X has accomplished two interesting things:
first, it made Apple the largest commercial UNIX vendor at a stroke, and
second, it revitalized Postscript as a display control language.

Ob. E ref: what's the status of the MacOS X port? Do I recall correctly that
we're awaiting a unified release that integrates the MacOS X porting effort?

Best regards,
Paul Snively