Jun 98 Factory Floor
Volume Number: 14
Issue Number: 6
Column Tag: From The Factory Floor
Ron Liechty, Metrowerks Ombudsman
Dave Mark and Ron Liechty, ©1998 by Metrowerks, Inc., all rights reserved.
This month's interview is with Ron Liechty, Metrowerks' official online voice of
reason. I've long had this suspicion that Ron does not sleep. Ever. If I'm up on line at
3am and post something to Ron, I get an instant reply. 9am, same thing. 10pm, same
thing. I have yet to catch him napping. Ron, what is your secret?
Ron Liechty is the ombudsman and the award winning online representative for
Metrowerks. His e-mail box is always open at MWRon@metrowerks.com. Although a
grandfather with two grandsons Jaymz and Jaysn and a granddaughter Odessa, Ron finds
time to ride his motorcycle when the weather is nice. His latest bike is a 97
Harley-Davidson Dyna Convertible that has been lowered and sports a wide glide tank
and other custom additions.
Dave: Ron, how did you first hook up with Metrowerks?
Ron: I was an early member of the CodeWarrior team and quite proud that my
employee ID is a single digit. In March of 1994, I was a forum leader on America
Online and also teaching the online C++ course for Brian Novack who had worked with
Greg Galanos before. CodeWarrior DR/2 was about to ship and the first Apple PowerPC
computers would be hitting the shelves. Greg wanted someone to monitor the AOL,
CompuServe and Internet groups to help fledgling Warriors. When Brian heard that
Greg was looking he recommended me for the job. After some discussion with Greg
online about what my duties would be Greg Galanos and Jean Belanger decided to take a
chance on me and I joined Metrowerks.
Dave: What exactly is an Ombudsman?
Ron: An ombudsman is an agent of the company appointed by the company to represent
its customers. Greg Galanos and Jean Belanger have always stressed the philosophy
that Metrowerks does what is right for our users and this fundamental principle has
been passed along to all Metrowerks employees. I am just lucky enough to be the public
figure that our users see.
CodeWarrior was to have two development releases and then the 3rd version of
CodeWarrior was to be a full release. CodeWarrior 3 was not up to the standard of a
release product so an extra Fourth of July CD was burnt and sent to all registered
CodeWarriors. This is the care and concern for our customers that dominates
Metrowerks today.
Greg Galanos has had an open door policy and as Metrowerks grew made it clear that
also extended to the research and development and operations departments as well. It is
the open door to everyone in the company that allows me to be an effective agent for all
our users.
Dave: You must live on the nets! Can you list the newsgroups and online
services you monitor for Metrowerks?
Ron: Most people are familiar with my work on
comp.sys.mac.programmer.codewarrior, that I will generally read five times a day. I
read enough of every message posted there, (both questions and all replies) to
determine if this is a technical or a programming question. I also read the messages on
comp.sys.mac.oop.powerplant several times a day.
I browse all of the comp.sys.mac.programming and
comp.os.ms-windows.programmer.tools.misc several times a day. In addition to these
newsgroups I browse about 12 other newsgroups looking for subjects that may affect
Metrowerks or our customers. Besides the normal newsgroups I monitor the
Metrowerks forum on CompuServe. I used to monitor America Online and GEnie but
they no longer have appropriate forums.
Dave: Can you categorize the types of traffic your look out for?
Ron: I not only read the messages in order to help our users, I also try to get a feel of
what our users want and how they feel about Metrowerks. When users are upset or the
same problems crop up repeatedly I report this to management so changes can be made.
When users praise CodeWarrior I pass this on so credit is given to those responsible.
In the newsgroups that are not specific to Metrowerks I look for people that may have a
common problem associated with Metrowerks or any messages with CodeWarrior or a
short hand for CodeWarrior in the title. I look for angry postings to be sure they aren't
directed at CodeWarrior. On the generic Java or C/C++ newsgroups I will look for any
messages concerning Macs. I will also read random messages that catch my eye. For
example Pascal messages that deal with ThinkPascal. Questions and the responses to
them are useful for directing the future of our Pascal development.
Dave: Outside of newsgroups and e-mail, with what net events have you
been involved?
Ron: Metrowerks has hosted several live meetings on America Online with Greg
Galanos and other top engineers answering questions. This live interaction is great to
get a pulse of our users and see how they feel about CodeWarrior, its products, and the
direction in which we are moving.
I also worked in the background to arrange for Greg Galanos' live appearance on the
Internet Radio show "Hackerz".
As a public figure for Metrowerks I am often contacted by authors and 3rd party
vendors and can initiate their interaction with Metrowerks.
Dave: What else do you do at Metrowerks?
Ron: I also do technical writing in my spare time. I write and maintain the MSL C and
MSL C++ References.
Dave: There have been some exciting changes in the Standards lately.
Can you comment on this? And tell us where you go for your standards
info.
Ron: Yes Dave, most people are aware of the changes made to C++ now that we have a
Working Standard. However, there is also the new JTC1/SC22/WG14 N794 C
Standards as well. There is a lot of work to be done and I try to take a week off the
newsgroups every so often to devote to just writing.
The new C standards commonly known as C9X standards are the biggest expansion of C
since it was first standardized. The new standards add a lot of new math routines and
wide character functionality among other library additions. Some of the more popular
C++ language components such as // style comments are also added to the standard
language.
Adding the new wide character (wchar_t type) support in C requires two new headers
wctype.h and wchar.h. While the wctype.h is pretty much a replica of the familiar
ctype.h header except for the wide character type. Wchar.h is much more complex and
is the largest header in the C standard library. Wchar.h covers much of the string.h,
stdio.h and stdlib.h functionality for wchar_t wint_t types and the null terminated
multibyte wide-character sequences. Typically the functions for wchar_t are named
with a w in their name such as wscanf() or wprintf() that are the wide character
equivalents of scanf() or printf(). The wide character string functions replace str
with wcs in their names. For example, wcscpy is the wide character string equivalent
of strcpy.
main()
wchar_t name[81] = L"";
wcscpy(name, L"Ron Liechty");
wprintf(L"My name is %s", name);
return 0;
}
Wide character string literals are designated with a L"... " declaration but much of the
rest of it is similar to the standard ANSI Character set. One significant difference is
that the end of file character is WEOF.
The official Committee Document (CD) for C9X is (at the time of this interview)
available to the public. This document, known as N2620, is available electronically
from http://www.dkuug.dk/JTC1/SC22/open/n2620/ in PostScript, Adobe Acrobat
and Unix formatted text version. A press release is also available at
http://www.ncits.org/press/1997/pr97157.htm and this lists a place where you can
purchase the standards.
It has been a hard task trying to document the C++ Libraries, since they have expanded
so much beyond the old AT&T CFront standards that most older books deal with. I felt it
was essential to annotate the stream libraries because this is what the CFront
libraries primarily dealt with. In the future I will document the new STL facilities of
the libraries and then annotate them..
I recently was fortunate to work as the facilitator with Stephen Prata so that his latest
edition of the C++ Primer Plus includes a version of CodeWarrior Lite. This book is
the first popular book to deal with the Final Draft International Standard C++. The
entire Metrowerks team did yeoman duties adjusting the compiler and Metrowerks
Standard Libraries to enable namespace std and other STL functionality. The
information on this book is...
Mitchell Waite Signature Series: C++ Primer Plus Third Edition,
Stephen Prata.
Waite Group Press (subsidiary of Macmillian Computer Publishing),
ISBN# 1-57169-131-6.
I'm very impressed with this book. It is over 1000 pages and covers new and old C++
features like RTTI, Exceptions, STL container classes, etc. in a way that interesting
and often amusing.
Another book for those interested in the C++ standard is Bjarne Stoustrup's The C++
Programming Language, Third Edition:
The C++ Programming Language Third Edition
Bjarne Stroustrup
Addison-Wesley Publishing Company
ISBN# 0-201-88954-4
There is no legitimate source for the FDIS version of the C++ Standard but you can
find the last December 96 Working Paper version of The C++ Standard at
ftp://research.att.com/dist/c++std/WP/CD1/
You can also purchase a copy of the standard from
CBEMA
1250 Eye Street, Suite 200
Washington, DC 20005
Tel: 202-737-8888
They have not set a purchase price yet, as the international standard has not yet been
finalized. but by the time this interview hits the streets, the standard should be
finalized and the price should be set.
Dave: I understand that you like to teach online as well. Where would
you point a beginner to get their programming questions answered?
Ron: Yes I still teach a class on America Online on Sunday nights. It helps to keep me
in touch with novice programmers. I've had all ranges of students from those that
never took a programming course to several NASA engineers trying to get a grasp on
C++. It's a non-accredited course so you pretty much get out of it what you put into it.
My philosophy is that learning occurs in three stages. The first stage you know nothing
and know you know nothing. The second stage you know a lot and think you know it all.
The final stage you know a lot but realize that you really know nothing. I feel if I can
help my students over the second stage that is all I can do.
Mac OS programmers are lucky in that the eagerness to help each other seems almost
boundless. Besides the newsgroups such as comp.sys.mac.programmer.help and
comp.sys.mac.programmer.codewarrior there are several organizations that are eager
to help Mac OS programmers.
One excellent tutorial site online is Macintosh C by K. J. Bricknell and Macintosh
Pascal by Koryn Grant and K. J. Bricknell
http://cafe.AmbrosiaSW.com/alt.sources.mac/macintosh-c/. This is an excellent
tutorial site for both Macintosh C and Macintosh Pascal beginners.
The AIMED organization has a Study Course / Mentor program at
http://www.themost.org/. This site qualifies students for an Academic version of
CodeWarrior if they meet the MOST Standards.
For programming resources http://www.program.com/mac/ is an useful web site
with links to Mac OS programming resources. Of course MacTech Magazine
http://www.mactech.com/ is helpful for programmers both new and experienced.
Metrowerks also provides an excellent site for additional links
http://www.metrowerks.com/tools/
I regret that I am leaving out many areas such as Warrior World for PowerPlant
programming ww-general@codewarrior.org and many list servers, too numerous to
mention.
Dave: Any closing thoughts?
Ron: Working for Metrowerks has been and extremely rewarding job. I especially
like helping novice programmers. Having been self taught in C++ and I understand the
confusion and problems that one can get into simply because they don't understand the
jargon.
Metrowerks engineers have been very patient with me when I pester them with
questions and often follow up with more questions to clarify a statement. I don't want to
just answer a question, I want to answer a question in a manner that the questioner
will understand.
While the cost of Metrowerks CodeWarrior Professional is a small factor in the
corporate world (It costs less for a 50 seat site license than the seats the engineers
are sitting on), for a person programming as a hobby or self education the cost is real.
I am glad that the online exposure that Metrowerks provides to these budget minded
warriors is part of the value of CodeWarrior.