Re: Back & Forth - A programming tale in graphic detail

On 30-01-2025 23:51, Anton Ertl wrote:

Exactly the reason why I have never looked into SVG.  I already knew
PostScript years before SVG was released.

Can't say that differs from my experience. I used Spellbinder as a wordprocessor in 1984. But I didn't like the (separate) printing program that came with it. So I wrote my own in Pascal. In 1987 I ported it to C and named it "Just Another Printing Program". It was so powerful you could print EBCDIC straight away - by *DEFINING* it. The same for Postscript. This is the definition:
-l=66
-m=4
-eh=tcpm
-el=tcpm
-ef=tcpm
-u=pscript.chr
-a=pscript.prc
-s="%!PS-Adobe-3.0\n%%Creator: JAPP V\v\n%%Title: \f\n%%CreationDate: \d\n%%Orientation: Portrait\n%%EndComments\n/Courier findfont 12 scalefont setfont\n"
-r=\n%%Trailer\n
-sp="%%Page: \p \p\n"
-rp=showpage\n
-sl="0 \(67 12 * 2 @ 12 * -) moveto ("
-rl=") show"
-ff=\0
-bm=2
-keepbuffer
-adjustonread
The fun part is: this is essentially the predecessor of 4tH:
-sl="0 \(67 12 * 2 @ 12 * -) moveto ("
It was a Forth inspired RPN engine, but it didn't have procedures or conditionals or loops. When it did, it became 4tH..
Yeah, I know it is a language - it shares some roots with Forth, actually. But like I said, I wasn't out to create some elaborate library, I just wanted vector graphics - quickly and easily. And I think this lib fulfills those requirements very well.
Hans Bezemer