E-Prime 2.0 Pro vs. non-Pro incompatibilities

[David McFarlane]

Jodene talked with Matt at PST and came away with the following:

"1. Standard e-run will not run a script file compiled with eprime pro.
"2. Pro will run a standard experiment only after it is converted to 
pro, which you do by opening a new experiment, selecting to make the 
new experiment 'standard' and then cutting/pasting the pro experiment 
into the standard experiment."

I am afraid that this information set me on the wrong track in some 
posts elsewhere (I should know better than to trust PST to get their 
facts straight :)).  I finally ran my own tests using one machine 
with Professional and another with non-Pro, and got much better results:

- An .ebs2 (E-Run) file generated by non-Pro will run in E-Run Pro.
- An .ebs2 file file generated by Pro will run in E-Run non-Pro, at 
least if it does not use any Pro features (I did not test any Pro features).
- An .es2 (E-Studio) file made in non-Pro will open in E-Studio Pro.
- An .es2 file made in Pro will *not* (repeat, *not*) open in E-Studio Pro.
- Finally (pay attention here), an .es2 file made in non-Pro will 
open in E-Studio Pro, and if you change that file in Pro and save it, 
the resulting .es2 file will *still* open back in non-Pro (hooray!), 
at least if it does not use any Pro features (I did not test any Pro features).

So the only problem comes with sharing .es2 files written in Pro with 
others who do not have Pro, even if those experiments do not use any 
Pro features.  Everything else works as I would expect.

I then confirmed the above with Matt (thanks).  As Matt explained, 
2.0 is still in rapid development (i.e., 2.0 is not stable), this 
behavior already differs from its behavior a week or so ago, and this 
behavior may change again at any moment.

I hope this clarifies the situation somewhat and helps folks make 
upgrade and purchasing decisions.

If you want some extra technical details, read on, otherwise stop here...

In versions 1.x all the files were plain text files, and could be 
opened in any text editor for viewing, printing, and even 
editing.  In 2.0, the .ebs2 files for both Pro and non-Pro are still 
text files in a sense, but it is all xml text.  In particular, the 
generated .ebs2 script is no longer readable text but is bin.base64 
encoded, presumably already compiled into executable form.  Also, 
when I generated the same experiment in both Pro and non-Pro, I found 
that the xml headers were identical (except for the file date & 
time), and the bin.base64 data started out identical, but then soon 
diverged.  I do not have the skills to explore that any further.

The non-Pro .es2 files are also xml, although everything else is 
pretty much the same thing as in the 1.x .es files. However, .es2 
files that are *originated* in Pro are completely binary without a 
shred of text (even the text of my Text objects does not appear as 
text in the .es2 Pro file). But .es2 files that originate in non-Pro, 
get opened in Pro, then saved again, preserve the xml structure of 
the original non-Pro .es2 (at least, as long as no Pro features are added).

Once again, I stress this is all subject to change during the rapid 
development of 2.0.

-- David


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