For those who have been following the AMOS discussion, it has been
bought to attention that this subject belongs here (rather than on a
bunch of other message bases). Anyway, I recieved this mail concerning
AMOS, and the sender, not having posting privaleges on Internet news,
asked if it could be posted.
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Hi guys, sorry to have to e-mail you all, but my news access is read-only and I
wanted to shove my $0.02 worth into this great AMOS debate.
As far as I see it, the arguments for and against AMOS are:
1. AMOS *is* fast and easy to learn. It's possible to throw bobs around
and suchlike with a few commands and without delving into the RKM's
and learning complicated system structures.
2. AMOS does things in a *different* way to the standard Kickstart
libraries approach. It's still legal - it asks for all of its resources
at the start and gives them back when it's finnished.
Point 1 is what makes it a good language - especially for people who are new
to programming or have moved up from, say a C64 and want to treat the Amiga as
the same kind of machine, only with bells and whistles.
Point 2 causes the problems, but to me that's not the be-all and end-all of it.
A lot of people don't really care if their game/database/whatever runs on a WB
screen or not, just as long as it's easy to use and gives the kind of results
they want. On a standard 1 Meg, 2 drive setup, multi-tasking is next to
impossible anyway, so what does it matter ? (Yes, 1Meg,2 drive A500's are still
the majority machine.) But it *does* multi-task cleanly, even if you do have touse a different key to swap screens (ooh, tricky stuff!)
Yes, for anything which *needs* to interface with WB smoothly, ie a CLI utility,screen grabber, etc AMOS is not a suitable language. I'd use C for something
like that, in the same way I'd use assembler to write a demo and an AREXX
script for and multi-program control program. (And yes, I *do* have some,
admittedly varying, experience in all of these.)
So in summary, AMOS isn't the perfect language, any more than any other is. It
is good for some things though, especially for beginners, which is what I
believe this debate was all about.
Thanks for your time, I just wanted to get all that off my chest. If one of
you would like to post this to the net, feel free, and I hope it's cleared up
some of this debating.
TTFN
Tim.
--
"So Calvin, what if someone decides to invade America?" Belgarion
"Simple, Hobbes will eat them. It's what tigers do."
