Re: Ada on the Mac (was: AppletMagic stuff)

[kilgallen@eisner.decus.org (Larry Kilgallen)]

In article <dewar.844783703@schonberg>, dewar@schonberg.cs.nyu.edu (Robert Dewar) writes:

> By the way, I find it strange that Larry should be so concerned with 68K
> based Macs, for educational use it is nice to be able to support such
> machines at least a little bit, but I can't see any serious interest
> at a commercial level. Certainly the commercial interest we have seen
> in the Mac port so far is entirely PPC based.

Perhaps that interest is largely for in-house use.  I cannot name
a single commercial Macintosh product which is PPC-only.  I am sure
there are some, but the fact that I cannot name one indicates to me
that they are not plentiful.

Whether one can offer a PPC-only product to customers at some point
in time depends strongly on the nature of the product.  A special-purpose
item of interest only to "power users" might make it, but for any
case where one looks to bulk purchases for multiple users, one must
take care of the 68K machines which were handed down the food chain
to the least favored users.

As Jim Hopper has pointed out, this has nothing to do with the choice
of development environment.  Most 68K commercial products are probably
built on PPC.

(For those who might not be aware, the way most of the Macintosh
products work is to ship both 68K and PPC code bundled into the
same box and sometimes into the same file.)

Larry Kilgallen