CONCLUDING THOUGHTS

The examples in this chapter should provide a feeling for the different kinds of programs that can be written, and the different techniques that might be required for each. As you learn more about the details of writing PostScript programs, it is helpful to keep a bit of perspective about the kind of program you are constructing, so you can make your code readable where it should be, efficient where it counts, and well-behaved. The next two chapters take a hard look at the operand stack, since it is the principle mechanism for all program execution.

EXERCISES

1.In a page description program, is it more important to write code that is easily readable or code that is efficient? What kinds of procedures would you define, and why?

2.What kinds of PostScript programs would you expect to consume memory?

3.What do you think is a reasonable way to use a query program in an environment where there is only one-way communication (or in a batch system, which is essentially the same thing) ?