mckay@pur-ee.UUCP (Dwight D McKay) (02/03/86)
Product name: Personal Pascal
Price: $70.30 (including tax, from Von's Computers, W. Lafayette, IN)
Vendor: Optimized Systems Software, Inc. (OSS, the guys who made ACTION!)
1221 B Kentwood Avenue
San Jose, CA 95129
(408) 446-3099
Introduction:
I purchased Personal Pascal from my local dealer (Von's Computers, West
Lafayette, IN) Thursday at lunch and have been playing with it in my spare
time ever since. This package has got to be one of the best values for
those of you who, like myself, have not purchased the $300 development package
but want to do GEM programming on the ST. It generates compact, fast code
and makes using GEM easy through many library procedures to do windows, etc.
Description:
The package includes a non-copy-protected disk with a "system manager",
simple editor, compiler, linker, and complete libraries for various pascal
functions as well as a complete set of GEM interface functions. Along with
this comes a rather complete manual of 200+ pages, which describes: how to
use the editor, compiler, and linker, describes all of the included library
functions, describes windows, menus, alert boxes and event management with
GEM as well as a short description of their implementation of Pascal (right
down to notes on how they store the various variable types!)
On the disk they have included several demo programs to get you started.
These all compiled and ran with no trouble. The "system manager" provides a
handy GEM interface to the compiler, editor and linker. Compiler errors
pop-up in an alert box giving you the option of jumping into the editor to
fix things. It's simple enough to use that I don't think I ever even looked
at the section of the manual which descibes it!
Bencharks:
Although I've not extensively tested the compiler & linker here are the
compile times and sizes for my clock program (which follows in the next two
articles) and a simple "hello world" program. All times are for compiles
from a single sided floppy. "checks" refers to the optional compiler
run-time checking. The times were done with a wrist-watch stopwatch and so
are probably off by a second or two:
program: hello world clock
compile time
w/checks: 0'36" na (' = minutes, " = seconds)
w/o checks: 0'36" 1'25"
link time
w/checks: 0'45" na
w/o checks: 0'41" 1'05"
Total
w/checks: 1'21" na
w/o checks: 1'17" 2'30"
File size
source: 64 9672 (sizes are in bytes)
.prg files:
w/checks: 4179 na
w/o checks: 1361 23637
License and support:
The OSS license is simple. Sign the enclosed form, and put their message in
your program where the end user can see it. No fees, no fuss. As for
support, the package comes with an ID number which you use when calling
either their phone line (not an 800 number) or their BBS. They seemed very
eager from their documentation to be sure you could reach them if you had
any questions. I've not had to contact them yet so I can't comment on how
good their assistance is.
Overall Impression:
I've extremely happy with Personal Pascal. Over the weekend I've written my
first GEM program which I've posted in the next two messages (once as
source, once as uuencoded binary) so you can see just how easy it was to
do. My major complaint? Not enough room on the floppy. Only about 55k
remains after you clean off the demos. Other than that I'd say this is a
great way to start programming your ST in GEM inexpensively.
--Dwight Mckay, ECN Software Support [mckay@purdue-ecn]