I am often impressed with the thoroughness and accuracy of the articles in BYTE. However, I have some questions about ``Printers in Transition'' and ``The Printers Talk Back,'' both in your December 1993 issue. I am alarmed that your magazine would have its readers believe that dumb printers and bidirectional printer communication protocols are ``state of the art'' when the truth is that they have been in wide use for the better part of a decade.
The fact that these things are new to DOS does not mean that they are new to the computing world. I can only conclude that no one involved with the production of these articles had any knowledge of the Macintosh. If you aim to describe the state of the art, you should make sure that you understand current mainstream practice first.
Alex Lewin
Cambridge, MA
Flexible C++
Matthew Wilson
My approach to software engineering is far more pragmatic than it
is
theoretical--and no language better exemplifies this than C++.
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State of the Art or Mainstream?
