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Matthieu Cormier

Ronald Craig

Steven Fisher

Karl Keller

Karl-König Königsson

Mark McManus

Mark Pearse

Scott Steinman

Carl Sturtivant

 

 

Originally from the UK, and having lived for several years in Denmark in the late 1980s, I currently reside in Minneapolis, Minnesota, in the good old USA. My interests include things mathematical, physics, electronics, and computer science, as well as music, art and fiction (all three more passive than active on my part), Jungian and related psychology, and (non-procedural) cooking.

[This organism has a Jungian type of INTP and an Enneagram type of 5 (I don't know much about the latter, but it seems right). Its preferred mode of address is "Carl" rather than "Buster" or "Hey, you!". It has been kicked around enough in life ("seasoned" is the polite and harmonious term) that it is no longer easily offended or otherwise overwhelmed by external "stuff", or if it is the offended organism is set aside by me and left to suffer on its own until it's done, the poor thing.]

About a decade ago I used Prograph "Classic" on a Mac IIci along with Think C to write or integrate XPrims (and was disappointed at the data segment limitations---you really wanted to know that, didn't you?). When the first version of CPX came out, I took up the offer to upgrade for a relatively low price, but that's as far as I got on the Mac, shortly thereafter moving to Windows 3.1 and the Symantec compiler for pragmatic reasons. This millenium I returned to Prograph CPX after a long hiatus, when I installed Basilisk II (the 68K mac emulator) on my PC, taking the ROM code from my old Mac-in-the-basement and installing all the stuff I used to have inside there. That inspired me to see if a Windows version existed, and indeed it did, from a nearly defunct Pictorius. I also used that a little, using the Digital Mars compiler (the free successor to the Symantec compiler) for Xprims.

My main disappointment with Prograph is the lack of an import/export facility for code from/to a text representation, or of any available classes and methods to internally manipulate code. Either one of these would have made it possible for a program (either an external script or a Prograph program) to automatically generate code (for example to integrate an external C++ library such as wxWindows directly as a collection of Prograph classes), and would also have made it possible to build executables outside of Prograph by other means, (for example by translation into C or C++ or Objective C), transcending the limitations of the Prograph compiler (which didn't make it to OS 10.3 on the Macintosh despite professional Carbonization and had trouble with the transition of lib formats from OMF to MS-COFF on Windows). Unfortunately Prograph code is so "proprietary" that only the Prograph IDE can read it, and the latter dictates only manual work can edit/create code. Oh dear, that's a tad counterproductive.

I joined the mailing list some time ago after being contacted by Ron Craig by virtue of appearing on the old comp.lang.prograph newsgroup. Now, in addition to Windows, I have a Mac running 10.3 (an old G3 suitably upgraded), because it struck me forcibly that if I was going to be a successful participant that would be essential. And the Object model in Cocoa/Objective C lends itself remarkably well to this project, as Ron instantly agreed, so I decided to forget portability for a while as a means of having very simple clean architecture as well as a relatively short simple project, so there's some chance of completion and satisfaction. Hence the Phoenix Project (more-or-less-official title), started at the beginning of 2004.