#: 5236 S15/Hot Topics
    15-Jul-90  19:12:30
Sb: #5207-Is Basic out of date?
Fm: Kevin Darling (UG Pres) 76703,4227
To: Jim Williams 72157,3524

Eet -

Unfortunately, there's a good reason why you don't see Amiga programs running
on remote GUI terminals... the programs often diddle directly with video
memory. Which kind of cuts out remote usage, unless perhaps someone rigged up
some hardware interrupts a la Bridgeboard wherein any write to Ami video memory
caused a program to go and echo that change to the remote. Can you say "slow"
?

Those that don't diddle, but instead use only gfx library calls, could possibly
use a rewritten library that sends the commands to a remote terminal. Alas,
another stickler pops up: like many windowing systems, the Amiga OS allows
_programs_ to directly change gfx context info structures. What this means is
that a program could change, say, whether a menu item was enabled or not... but
without a new SetMenuStrip call, the remote would never know.

Of course, you could send the entire menu structure over on each mouse menubar
click, but ugh! The CoCo, btw, has one instance of this nasty... its menu
structure can also be changed, and without an UpdateMenuBar (UMBar) call, a
remote wouldn't know. And I betcha neither Amiga nor CoCo programmers make
those update calls for every little change (?). I gritted my teeth when I saw
this on the CoCo GUI. That kind of setup is written from the standpoint of a C
programmer, and goes against the cardinal rule (of mine ;-) that any change to
an OS structure should be done via the OS only.

Sorry. Got me fired up a little . - kev