What was photoshop coded in

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Linkedin Reddit Pocket Flipboard Email. Photoshop 1. More From The Verge. Sign up for the newsletter Verge Deals Subscribe to get the best Verge-approved tech deals of the week. The Photoshop 1. The Museum says about 75 percent of the original program was written in Pascal and another 15 percent is in machine language for the Motorola processor , the original chip for the Macintosh line.

The rest of the source code is made up of various bits of data. You can download the Photoshop 1. In fact, files ending in. A peek inside two corresponding files URotate. This is what Pascal looks like lines to from URotate.

On the other hand, this is what assembly code looks like lines 12 to 57 from URotate. The difference between high-level language source in Pascal and low-level machine instructions also shows in the fact that the assembly code contains several comments explaining what is going on in lines starting with a semicolon, e. Compute address of one pixel past last while the more abstract but descriptive Pascal source seemingly needs no further explanation.

But now let us conclude our short survey of filename extensions. Wikipedia has a comprehensive list of filename extensions we could check for the remaining suffixes. In this case, however, it is not much help. So we will have to help ourselves and examine the files to make sense of them. All of the. Therefore, they can probably be treated and counted as some kind of addition to the main Pascal files or simply ignored because they do not contain information meaningful to our analysis.

Of the three. It references the other source files of the code like this lines 71 to 82 :. Apparently, Photoshop. And while it contains no algorithms or other code constructs of particular interest to us, we do learn one more thing from Photoshop. Lines 31 to 33 tell us that the source files ending in. A look inside one of those files shows data encoded in hexadecimal form like this lines 8 to 18 from UAbout. Finally, the two files ending in.

To get a general feeling for the size, let us first simply compare files. The smallest of the top-ten is the assembly file USeparation. File sizes are a decent indicator of code size. Although the style of the language and also of the programmer complicate things a lot. Again, take a look at URotate. Of these nineteen lines of assembly code, only five should actually be counted as LOC lines 12, 14, 23, 24 and 28 as the others do not contain any instructions to the machine.

Excluding empty and comment lines with tools like wc is tricky. So we better use a dedicated program.

A very good choice for counting LOC—although not the most modern or fastest one—is the free and open-source program cloc. One advantage of cloc is that you can tell it to process files in a particular programming language. With a few well-chosen arguments we can include. As you can see, the totalized sum of blank, comment and code lines given by cloc equals the But cloc tells us considerably more.

Also, counting only lines of actual code, the ratio of Pascal language to assembly language is not as we originally assumed on the basis of file size alone but more like ! Excluding the. Photoshop, we may conclude, was probably a large program by the standard of the day. In any case, more than one-hundred thousand lines is certainly more than enough for us to tackle in a critical code study.

Of course, nothing we have done so far amounts to a substantial analysis of the actual source code of Adobe Photoshop—least of all to a critical code study of the program.

We have identified the central. From the filenames and occasional peeks inside this and that file, we have gotten an idea where to look for sections of the code concerning specific functions or components of the program. And we have done so using nothing more than very simple instruments like common file browsers and basic Unix command-line tools plus one dedicated programm to count LOC and some additional resources that can easily be found on the Internet.

Next time, we will talk about the Pascal and assembly language used for Photoshop, see if we can extract more information from the source files with the help of standard Unix command-line tools and maybe even start poking and prodding at select pieces of code. So, if you are interested, please come back for part II in November!