book

Masterminds of Programming

by Federico Biancuzzi, Chromatic

March 2009

Intermediate to advanced

496 pages

18h 40m

English

O'Reilly Media, Inc.

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Organization of the MaterialConventions Used in This BookHow to Contact UsSafari® Books Online
Design DecisionsUsing the LanguageOOP and ConcurrencyFutureTeaching
The Pythonic WayThe Good ProgrammerMultiple PythonsExpedients and Experience
Paper and PencilElementary PrinciplesParallelismLegacy
The Forth Language and Language DesignHardwareApplication Design
The Goals Behind BASICCompiler DesignLanguage and Programming PracticeLanguage DesignWork Goals
The Life of AlgorithmsLanguage DesignUnix and Its CultureThe Role of DocumentationComputer ScienceBreeding Little LanguagesDesigning a New LanguageLegacy CultureTransformative TechnologiesBits That Change the UniverseTheory and PracticeWaiting for a BreakthroughProgramming by Example
The Power of ScriptingExperienceLanguage Design

A Functional TeamTrajectory of Functional ProgrammingThe Haskell LanguageSpreading (Functional) EducationFormalism and Evolution
The Soundness of TheoremsThe Theory of MeaningBeyond Informatics
A Seminal PaperThe LanguageFeedback and EvolutionXQuery and XML
Engineering Objective-CGrowing a LanguageEducation and TrainingProject Management and Legacy SoftwareObjective-C and Other LanguagesComponents, Sand, and BricksQuality As an Economic PhenomenonEducation
Power or SimplicityA Matter of TasteConcurrencyDesigning a LanguageFeedback Loop
Language and DesignGrowing a LanguageC#The Future of Computer Science
Learning and TeachingThe Role of the PeopleUMLKnowledgeBe Ready for ChangeUsing UMLLayers and LanguagesA Bit of ReusabilitySymmetric RelationshipsUMLLanguage DesignTraining DevelopersCreativity, Refinement, and Patterns
The Language of RevolutionsLanguageCommunityEvolution and Revolution
Designed to LastResearch and EducationInterfaces to LongevityStandard Wishes
An Inspired AfternoonReusability and GenericityProofreading LanguagesManaging Growth and Evolution

Content preview from Masterminds of Programming

Chapter 16. PostScript

Designed to Last

How do you define PostScript?

Charles Geschke: PostScript is a programming language whose primary purpose is to provide a high-level description of the content of (printed) pages in a device-independent representation.

John Warnock: PostScript is an interpretive programming language that emulates a simple, stack-oriented virtual machine. In addition to the normal operators found in most programming languages, PostScript has a very rich set of image, graphic, and font rendering operators. With PostScript, an application can emit PostScript commands in a resolution-independent manner that will define the appearance of a printed page (or display).

I think PostScript was successful because it is so flexible and has a well-defined underlying imaging model. Other printer protocols of the time attempted to statically define pages with data structures. These protocols invariably would fail at describing some intuitively simple pages.

What made you create the language PostScript and not a data format? ...