Hi Leo, I've enjoyed reading this board for a long time. I've stayed away from the bloatware, rip on the suite stuff since I worked on it for a while.
After Utah was generally shut down, a handful of developers were kept on completing WordPerfect 7. It still had the same base code in it as 6.x. There was a lot of work done on the UI and some internals updated. Since then, it has been all Ottawa people. To the best of my knowledge nobody was kept on after that. There was a huge effort to move the code to MFC instead of using the WP custom base classes for the UI. The basic engine would not be able to be changed and still keep the feature set intact and have a chance of being reliable.
The code was never really documented well. There were pieces of subsystems with reasonable documentation, but not a lot of them. Most of the knowledge was in the heads of the people who wrote it. WP had very little turnover in development staff, and they got away with it. Although, there were many sections of the code rewritten to be able to support the Windows event driven model, there was many chunks of the formatter and other code that still looked very similar to the original DOS 6.0 assembly language the original Windows 6.0 version was ported from. I find it hard to believe that newer versions use a substantially different set of base code.
I've not been involved, so I don't know for sure, but if I was a betting man, I suspect I would recognize a lot of code in the newest version.
There was a version of WP 6.0 that was written for various flavors of Unix. It was also ported off of the DOS assembly version. It was sold off to a separate company to continue development on it. Some of these people were involved in the original version. I understand that Corel picked this back up and I believe that the Linux version was built from this code base.
I don't know this for sure, and it would be great if someone knows differently and was able to share with us.
WP is a huge program. Corel wanted to build a real OO version that was re-entrant and could work as a component. There was to have been an effort to do that, but Corel never had enough money to support upgrades to the current project and have a separate effort on another version. The new version could not come out with only half the features. It would have to be brought into the world full grown and ready for prime time. This is a huge job. Also the reveal codes and code model is not something that can really be easily supported in an Object Oriented world. It was never designed for that. I would say that the odds of a really new engine that was re-entrant and object oriented for WP being built and used in the current version while supporting all the old features and reveal codes is 0%.
I think Rod is overly harsh on the quality of many of the people who worked on the product, but it still has to be the feature laden monolithic program it always was.
That's as much as I know about what happened to the code after the code was moved to Ottawa. |
