squeak printing?

Alan Kay Alan.Kay at squeakland.org
Wed Feb 6 14:53:12 UTC 2002


Folks --

This has always flabbergasted me. Why isn't the standard print port 
on current day OS's represented at least by a pseudofile called 
"Print". Even if they "don't know nothin' about objects", this was a 
technique that goes all the way back to the idea of streams as 
articulated by Chris Strachey in the 60s for !@#$%^ sake! In several 
of his OS designs (one of which got implemented at PARC), many things 
were mapped to stream protocols, including regular files, and much 
other IO.

What is so !@#$%^& difficult about this idea in this day and age? (or 
any day and age?)

Cheers,

Alan



At 7:40 AM -0500 2/7/02, David T. Lewis wrote:
>On Thu, Feb 07, 2002 at 11:09:48AM +0100, Hannes Hirzel wrote:
>>
>>  > John M McIntosh <johnmci at smalltalkconsulting.com> wrote:
>>  >
>>  > >I'm wondering if there is any interest in printing from Squeak on the
>>  > >mac. It seem Apple has made it a wee bit more friendly to print
>>  > >either a bitmap/form or dump postscript into a print stream.
>
>	<snip>
>
>>  Under Linux one could probably easily feed the output of Marcel Weiher's
>>  postscript framework to the system printing  queue.
>
>Dumping Postscript to an external print queue would be nice. With a bit
>of hackery on top of CommandShell/OSProcess, it could be implemented as:
>
>	aMorph asPostscript pipeTo: 'lpr'
>
>Does OSProcess work on OS/X? and does OS/X use a unixy sort of print
>queueing system? If so, I'll volunteer to do the CommandShell hack.
>
>>  Coming up with a solution which works reasonably at on the
>>  major platforms is probably the challenge.
>
>Right.
>
>Dave


-- 



More information about the Squeak-dev mailing list