The version reviewed – PS Elements – retails for €73. If someone can’t afford that, how can he afford a computer in the first place?

Lemme guess. You means “thousands of students who have no choice but to sit in front of the thing and fake a smile at you until they can go home and play CoD on their XBox”.

I was also a kid once, you know.

…or not. I have introduced GIMP to thousands and not one found the adventure painful. How does PS induce pain in users of GIMP who cannot afford PS and have never used it? That’s silly. GIMP has a GUI. A lot of it is self-explanatory and most ordinary folk with a digital camera or scanner can do everything they need with GIMP. That said, I still prefer ImageMagick for a lot of work. e.g. yesterday, the little woman found Kijiji inverted an image. I inverted it for her with a single command and Kijiji turned it right side up. It was an ad and the item sold within hours. FLOSS works.

So in their last round-up of sub-€100 image manipulation programs, PS Essentials was way ahead of the rest, some of the rest had interesting features – and the poor GIMP came out second-to-last only because they included Paint.NET. Remarkable quote from the review: “If you want to use GIMP, you should have a high pain tolerance.”

You are slowing beginning to think a little more clearly, Mr. Pogson, and that is a good thing. Certainly PhotoShop is a product that only appeals to a narrow niche of users who can take advantage of its features to generate some economic advantage in their work.

My own, very limited as are yours I am sure, needs are met with Paint Shop Pro which I acquired years ago for either Win2K or XP, I don’t remember exactly, and which still functions just fine with Win7. I think that it was sold to Corell or vice-versa a few years ago.

If you are really in the business of graphics design, you will use PhotoShop, most likely on a Macintosh computer. If you are just chipping, you might even use Gimp, but I bet most Gimp users use it with Windows.

So, Ted admits that PS is a product for a very narrow niche. In my whole life I have only met professional graphic artists back in high school, decades ago. There aren’t that many of them…

This is just being dishonest, and spinning numbers in your favour.

Photoshop CS6 itself costs $699 or $999. The scary sounding $2600 you quote is for the Master Collection bundle, which contains Photoshop and about 10 other separate complete applications, most of which work together.

“GIMP is proof that PS is not essential. I certainly have no use for it and I am a professional.”

But you are not a professional graphics artist.

Regarding “.Net optimization,” which appears to be yet another Oiaohm fantasy without attribution.

One of the things that annoys me about working with C# (what with me being a C/C++ guy and all) is the almost complete lack of compiler options for optimization.

That said, read this from the horse’s mouth, as it were.

I suspect, though I am open to being proved wrong, that Oiaohm is crediting the .Net compiler with far more of an aggressive optimizer than it is capable of.

Note that there is (and I am wrong) a single bytecode that references casting.

checkcast … C0 … “checks whether an objectref is of a certain type, the class reference of which is in the constant pool at index (indexbyte1 << 8 + indexbyte2)"

I freely admit that I have no idea what this is used for. It might be used to attach type information to Java generics, although I doubt it, because all the necessary upcasting and downcasting has already been determined by the compiler. But still. It might be.

I suspect, but have no evidence, that it is in fact intended for use with runtime type-checking, otherwise known as dynamic typing.

The desirable properties of (nonexistent in current Java or JVM) reified generics are well summarised here.

Now, you can read through as much of this stuff as you care to (and it’s more than I cared to, although I enjoyed it as a purely intellectual exercise) and you will never, I repeat never, come across an instance where const cast, static cast, reinterpret cast, or c-cast are part of JVM bytecode. (The alert reader will spot the missing beast: explained below.)

See, there are only 220 or so of the things. Kinda limiting.

Regarding which, Oiaohm, I wish to point out yet one more egregious misunderstanding of your own links:

C-Style Casts with slash-clr

Yes under CLR C and C++ are mapped up same you do under Java.

You do realise that /clr is a parameter passed to the .Net compiler, don’t you? You do realise that it has no bearing whatsoever on typecasting information in the resultant bytecode, don’t you? You do realise that it cannot possibly do so, because the resultant bytecode doesn’t understand typecasting? You do realise that (JVM or CLR) this is intentional, don’t you? You do realise that this is the entire point of having a compiler (Java, C#, Pascal, whatever) in the first place, don’t you?

Well, perhaps not.

Incidentally, you never got back to me on that “exceptions” thing, possibly because you have never programmed in a language that features exceptions. Here’s the thing about exceptions and type casting and type safety (Ourobouros be praised! We round the circle!):

The basic reason for typecasting in either C# or Java is either to upcast or to downcast..

Both upcasting and downcasting are invisible to the respective bytecode sets, and do you want to know why?

Because they operate at a higher level, that’s why. The only thing that cares about upcasting and downcasting is the Java or .Net runtime. Not the bytecode.

And do you want to know what happens when (either) runtime detects an inadmissible upcast or downcast?

It throws an exception, that’s what happens.

It’s an almost completely different approach to C/C++ style typecasting, and I was hoping that you would notice that.

The only part of C++ typecasting that has any remote relevance to any of this is the dynamic cast, which does pretty much the same thing.

Hey, I hang targets out to dry, and all you can do is to claim that serializing one type and deserializing it into a random unrelated type constitutes “type safety” in Java.

I mean, I’m a big ole fat target here. Is that the best you can manage?