Title: The Wall

Dear Francis,

Thank you for the first number of the new-style C Vu. One of the things I disliked about the old format was that the layout often seemed rather cramped and unattractive, and while I do not want to appear carping it does seem rather a pity to move to a larger format and yet retain a cramped layout and a typeface so small it must be difficult for some people to read. Please could we have larger type and more white space!

My second request is for the regular inclusion, (perhaps inside the front or back cover), of a box stating how articles or letters for publication should be presented and sent to you. Perhaps the prominent availability of this information might encourage more first-time contributors to put pen to paper (metaphorically, of course).

What actually prompted me to write now was your editorial comment on the lack of good books for people just starting into programming. I do not want to pursue that problem, but to point out another area where I feel there is a real need for one or two good books and none seem to exist. I think there would be a considerable market (I would buy it, anyway!) for a book which provided an overview of changes in programming and applications development methods in the PC environment over the last ten years or so. I am thinking of more or less everything that has happened since a major application consisted of a single .EXE file and a couple of overlays, 1Mb was a lot of memory and 100 Mb a large hard disc.

I realise that quite a lot of the changes over this period have to do with the rise of Windows, but I am more interested in things like DLLs, real and protected mode, aspects of object and component technology like OLE, COM, Corba and Active-X, and ways of running applications over the internet - all of which seem to be characterised by ever-increasing complexity and fragmentation. I am looking for a book written from a programmer's point of view but not a book on how to write Active-X components or Java applets, rather one which explains in general terms how the various technologies work and how (if) they interact with each other, which relates the terminology of objects, members and attributes to programs and data in memory and files on disc, and explains why current applications and development environments require (if indeed they do really require) such enormous amounts of memory and disc space.

Helpful staff at Computer Manuals have been unable to suggest a book offering such an overview, and I am coming to suspect that one doesn't exist, but I would like to be proved wrong, and be very glad if you or any member could suggest a book or books covering the ground I have described.

Finally, could you perhaps arrange to publish sometime an update on how currently available C++ compilers are matching up to the standard, with comments and recommendations where appropriate?

Peter Moffatt <peter.moffatt@cali.co.uk>

I hope you like the changes I have introduced this time. However readers should note that we have lost about 15% of content. C Vu is widely read by editors of computing books. I hope that one of them will pick up your request and commission a book to fill it. Your final request is a very hard one. There isn't any current compiler that is close to compliance though some are closer than others. People have different priorities. For example I would prefer a compiler that got right everything that it did and did not encourage programmers to write non-conforming code. Others want a compiler that supports their programming needs in a specific environment and do not mind that the result is code that will be very difficult to port. Which would you prefer, a compiler that supported the whole of the ISO standard but was buggy and difficult to use or a compiler that was relatively bug free, supported most but not all the Standard and was easy to use?