[H-GEN] Text Processor Tool

Greg Black gjb at gbch.net
Mon Aug 2 02:40:05 EDT 2004


On 2004-08-02, James Mills wrote:
> On Mon, Aug 02, 2004 at 12:34:44PM +1000, Greg Black wrote:
>> I only run them in their native resolution -- my experience with
>> LCD screens is that their display quality sucks so badly in
>> anything other than native resolution that it's just not worth
>> it.  But your needs may well be different from mine.
> 
> I think this is not the case with the BenQ FP767 (or maybe the entire
> BenQ series ?) When I was diagnosed with my condition I went out with my
> mother (financial help at the time) to purchase an LCD. I tried several
> brands and only the BenQ (at the time) was any good.

Mine is a Benq FP731.  I'd normally be willing to try it at
whatever resolution it was that you're using, but that will have
to wait for a bit.  Normally, I have several machines by my side
with X servers on them, but my workstation turns out to be the
only that's running a X server on the OS it's currently running
and that X server has only one resolution in its config file,
which means I'd have to restart the X server to try another
resolution -- since I have 79 windows open at present on this
display, there's no way I'm going to lose all those threads of
mental processing to do this experiment today.  I'll have X
running on something else in the next few days, and I'll try the
screen on the first one that becomes available.

> Others had problems like:
> 
> * glare
> * not very clear

Yes, the not very clear effect is what I have noticed on most of
them, but I have to admit not trying the Benq yet.

>> From time to time, I consider docbook, but each time I look at
>> it I wonder how they managed to get it so wrong.  And so I don't
>> change.  Probably, if I ever do change, I'll write a completely
>> new language that will output TeX for quality hardcopy, PDF for
>> draft quality hardcopy, and HTML for browser quality output.
>> But this project would be incredibly boring under most normal
>> circumstances, so it will need some trigger to make it happen.
>> The kind of trigger that might work would be a decision to adopt
>> some new programming language and to use this as a project to
>> learn that language.
> 
> Would my desire for a new Text Processor with some quite different
> features help trigger this ?

Possibly, but you'd need to exercise a certain degree of
patience.

> Perhaps along with the Learning and using of the Python language (unless
> you already know it) ?

I think it's fair to say that I'm over Python for anything
non-trivial now.  I used it few years ago to write a couple of
mission-critical commercial applications; that amounted to
11,000 lines of Python, so it was a reasonably large project.

When the customers needed to upgrade their OS for security
patches, we upgraded Python at the same time.  Twice this broke
perfectly correct code as the Python idiots^Wdevelopers made
changes to the language that weren't backwards compatible.  In
the end, I decided to package a working Python implementation
with my code -- but this is no way to work and I won't waste my
time with python in future.

If I wrote software that had a two-year life cycle, it might be
worth the risk; but my customers typically end up using the same
code for twenty years or more and that means the source language
needs a bit of stability.

If I took this one on, I'd use either Lisp/Scheme or Erlang, as
they're the languages I'm considering at present for possible
future experiments.

Cheers, Greg




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