CompuServe Messages

Bill, Well, I was trying to be sarcastic when I made that remark to Jon about the MSDOS 68K cross-assembler. Hehe, guess I'm not too good at sarcasm. (Actually, tho, I do recall a fellow on here last month who was planning to code some music-related stuff on a cross-assembler. His planned software wasn't Amiga-specific, however, which makes a difference.) My point, tho perhaps poorly made, was that WordPerfect Corp. appears to have done some things (beta testing, for instance) bass-ackwards. This shouldn't have happened with a company of WP Corp.'s caliber. But I really am awfully glad that there IS an Amiga WordPerfect in the first place. It's far and away the most powerful word- processor Amy's got. Lynn has been helpful and receptive, and the phone support is terrific. I expect the update will fix many of the$bugs, and that further updates will get the rest of 'em. As for running WP on a 512K Amy, that's exactly wjat I'm having to do while my StarBoard2 is out for repairs. I'll tell ya, going back to 512K after six months of 2.5M bliss is a gear-jamming experience. I don't like it one bit! Still, a lobotomized Amy is better than no Amy at all. I've been very gentle with WP since discovering its various idiocyncrasies, so I haven't had any problems running it in 512K. The program is pretty stable if you know what to avoid. Also, I've been running it from its own boot- disk, which does nothing except assign T: to ram:, so as to conserve the maximum possible amount of memory. I do insist on using interlace, tho, which eats an extra 32K of my meager supply. You're quite right about Amiga programming. Programmers accustomed to mono-tasking OSes have to readjust their thinking and change their methods. Programmers accustomed to doing everything themselves have to (well, ought to) learn to use system resources. It's one thing, in my case, to learn 68K assembler–that's actually pretty easy. It's quite another thing to learn all the ins and outs of the Amiga's OS. (Not to even mentaon the fact that nearly everything is doc'd in C. Grrr.) Hopefully, WP's programmers will learn from their Amiga experience and get things right the first time on the Mac and ST. Learn the OS, _then_ write the program. David K.