Pleased To Meet You
Hi,
My name is Ian Dennis and I have joined the Lightsoft team.
As you can image the Fantasm project is a massive undertaking and I have joined the team to take away some of the burden from Rob and Stu.
So what's my background?
In some senses I learned to program late, I started about 19 and so have been doing it for about 9 years, (mainly for myself).
I guess I started with a weird language, because most people I talk to started on BASIC, well I started on Pascal. I then played with COBOL (tedious or what!, no offence COBOL programmers, that's just my opinion). After that I started on C.
Most of the programming I have done was on the PC platform (BOO, HISS, Bill is SATAN !). But well you use what you can get hold of, right! The best way to appreciate a good platform is to suffer a bad one first.
It was only after the coming of the famous (or infamous) RAD tool Visual Basic did I do any BASIC programming, not through choice but that was the platform I had to do my projects in.
It did teach me that BASIC is fairly powerful.
Assembler I learned late on, only about six months ago, writing embedded systems. So writing assembler on the Mac is new to me as well, but as most programmers know it is just learning the language specifics every time we start a new language.
Because of this I will be documenting the beginners guide to PowerPC assembly language. This makes sense, I can document my problems and successes in the guide to help you along the way to successful assembler programming.
So why do I want to write a compiler?
That's a good question, I'm a games person, play them all the time (if I get the chance!!). I will probably 'rant' on about games at some later date. I aim one day to write games commercially.
In some senses I think there are two programs that gain the respect of other users more than any other programs. One is an operating system and the other is a compiler. If either of these are written well it stands out. What is one of the Apple's greatest prides? It's OS. Great compilers are are recommended and relied on by programmers across the globe. There has to be such a feeling of pride to see some of the creations that have been developed on the Anvil development suite.
So why a compiler? Pride!!
I guess thats it, I hope to be of as much help as the rest of the team. You can contact me on email address:
Regards,
Ian
A beginners diary (14 July 98)