RE: [Freecats-Dev] Underlying Unix base

[Henri Chorand]

Marc,

Thanks for this detailed feedback. I had not dwelved in detail as much about
OO, only guessed the general picture, but I had not heard about
Softmaker/Textmaker.

Yves already expressed what VBA (Visual Basic for Applications - if I got it
well, it's simply VB + various app-specific features) represents for a
developer: very slow, rather buggy, under-documented (how do you think they
implement all these quick-&-dirty secret Windows routines to speed up their
apps)

Altogether, I developed around 10 VBA macros for simple text-processing
purposes, and I got really fed up with it, even though I used to rather like
VB (I wrote a couple of apps with it around, er... 10 years ago).

For instance, if Yves wants to port Wordfast to another word processor, it
seems tempting to look for a Word clone that would allow VBA apps to run. On
the other hand, he could also (on the long term):
- rewrite most/all his core routines in C / C++, or any other
string-friendly fast, compiled language (it may also help him to better
protect his code)
- only use VBA in order to call these core routines

This would then render any port much easier and faster to do, and would also
give translators a WordUltraFast software, capable of astounding
performances on a mere Pentium running at 100 MHz ;-))

Maybe I'm dreaming, in that these "core routines" are rather simple,
compared to the work needed on the user interface side...

> ... there is another word processor/office suite which aims
> to go the whole way, and support native Word macros.

It looks very interesting, and maybe Yves could try that.

As stated by Murphy's laws [sometimes called in French: "Loi de
l'emmerdement maximum"], I wonder how it comes up that one of the fastest
CAT tools available is written with the slowest interpreted language
available.


Henri