Programming in 2000/2004 - advise please?

Hi all

I used to do a lot of AutoLISP programming in R12/14 - but wondered what is the best technique nowadays for say AutoCAD 2000i, and 2004/2005?

Also can anyone advise any decent reference material, books etc?

Thanks in advance.

 

So, you're back from the tour of duty on the Enterprise?

While you were away visual lisp became more popular. Otherwise, most of
your beautiful babies will run just fine. There are 2 kinds of lisp
programmers now: casual users who clabber together something to
streamline their work, and lisp wizards who make it an avocation to
learn and apply every obscure function in (and many not in) the book.
These guys and gals are your friend, your rabbi, your guru. Treat them
well and they will give you a good education. Just post a question,
maybe include a bit of code, and advice will pour forth.

Personally, I'm sticking with vlisp. Vbasic is there but probably more
useful for serious developers.

rs

what is the best technique nowadays for say AutoCAD 2000i, and
2004/2005?

 

Thanks for your reply. If I want to use Vlisp with AutoCAD 2000i (and possibly 2004/2005) do I need to purchase Vlisp - if so where from? And can you recommend any good books?

Thanks in advance!

 

Vlisp (Visual Lisp) is included in the program. At the command line enter
VLIDE. Here is a book:

http://www.dsxcad.com/book/

Jeff

 

Well, Vlisp is your old friend Alisp with more commands added. You
should try Vlide, which is an editor / debugger / etc. that works right
in Acad. You can tell it's written by the same folks who wrote Autocad,
unintuitive, awkward, not very well documented. However, after a while
you may get to like it. Me, I go with TextPad and Mr. Puckett's
excellent Syntax listing (used by TextPad to color functions,
punctuation, comments, etc.)

There's a lot of powerful stuff added in vlisp. But not needed to
support most garden-variety utility macros. So go ahead and pound away;
you already know how and the vlisp help system is very good.

Look at "the AutoCADet's Guide to Visual Lisp" by Bill Kramer. He will
talk you right through fundamental lisp and then on up into vla
functions. Good reading; the cd is pretty helpful, too.

rs

possibly 2004/2005) do I need to purchase Vlisp - if so where from? And
can you recommend any good books?

 

Actually Visual LISP used to be called Vital LISP and was developed by
Basis Software, Inc. Its been around for years before it was purchased
by Autodesk. Its not much different than the original (last) version of
Vital LISP with exception to the name, funky new button colors, and
compiler interface with the inclusion of the VLX format. Internally
however Visiual LISP adds a variety of functions to to IDE which
interface ActiveX and VBA functionality, these are the added vlax- and
vla- prefixed function names. Oh and the existing vlx- prefix was
replaced with vl-. That went over nicely with folks who had alot of
legacy code already written in Vital LISP.

BTW you want a sample of unintuitive interface try Pro-Engineer rev
19-21. About as intuitive as a needle in a haystack. AutoCAD is about
one of the most intuitive interfaces you could have in a CAD system.


Regards

Jesse Danes

 

See my thread "Starting over from LISP to VB,VBA,VBA.NET" in the
autodesk.autocad.customization.vba NG on 3/24/2004 10:00 am. I received a
lot of good information about moving up in the world of AutoCAD programming.
There are other posts on that NG about the pros & cons of LISP verses VB. I
still am mainly using LISP, but I am slowly moving in the VB direction.