[net.micro.pc] Anyone familiar with PLINK86?

geller@rlgvax.UUCP (David Geller) (11/21/84)

If you have used this product I would appreciate your comments about it
concerning performance, reliability, and documentation. I've read a
review of PLINK86 in PC Tech Journal that leads me to believe it is
an excellent product.  Any additional criticisms/comments you might
have would be helpful. Thank you.

Product:  PLINK86
Company:  Phoenix Software Associates
	  1416 Providence Highway
	  Norwood, MA  02062

						David Geller
						rlgvax!geller

minitab@uwstat.UUCP (11/23/84)

> If you have used this product I would appreciate your comments about it
> concerning performance, reliability, and documentation. I've read a
> review of PLINK86 in PC Tech Journal that leads me to believe it is
> an excellent product.  Any additional criticisms/comments you might
> have would be helpful. Thank you.
> 
> Product:  PLINK86
> Company:  Phoenix Software Associates
> 	  1416 Providence Highway
> 	  Norwood, MA  02062
> 
> 						David Geller
> 						rlgvax!geller

The review is right!  PLINK86 is used to build all the commerical Fortran-
based products for which I have information:  a statistical package, a word
processing package, and a database package.  I recently polled my friends/
aquaintances working on the development teams for these products to see if
anything better had surfaced, because we are about to convert our Fortran-
based, VAX/VMS-developed product to MS DOS.  They confirmed that they still
use it exclusively, and are very happy with the latest version and the PFIX86
debugger.  We are buying PFIX86 and the PLINK86 update.  (We previously used
PLINK86 to convert the beta-test version of our product to the IBM PC and 
found it very satisfactory at that time.)

Though we use Fortran, I believe that PLINK86 may be used with any compiler
that conforms to the Microsoft version of Intel's linkage conventions.

My only relationship to Phoenix Software Associates is as a customer.

       Stephen L. Arnold, Joiner Associates Inc.
Mail   P.O. Box 5445, Madison WI  53705-0445
Phone  608 238-8134
Telex  650 110-6813
BITNET arnold@wiscpslb
ARPA   arnold%wiscpslb.BITNET@wiscvm.ARPA
UUCP   {allegra|cornell|purdue|ihnp4|burdvax}!psuvax1!arnold@wiscpslb.BITNET

johnl@ima.UUCP (11/27/84)

We also use PLINK86 and are quite happy with it.  It links slightly slower
than MS-LINK does, but since PLINK handles much larger programs, produces
better maps, handles overlays, and puts a symbol table on the program, we
use PLINK exclusively.

PFIXPLUS, the debugger from the same people, is also pretty good.  It has a
nice screen interface with separate windows for instructions, data, stack,
breakpoints, and such.  It understands the symbol table appended to the
executable file by PLINK, which makes life much easier than having to refer
to a listing all the time.

John Levine, Javelin Software
ima!johnl