terrell@OHIO-STATE.CSNET (Eric Terrell) (02/02/86)
******************************************************************************** I purchased the TDI Modula-2 system and have been using it for about a week. The system comes on two disks. Documentation is adequate, but the manual assumes that the user has a Modula-2 programming manual. Unlike many of the early programs for the 520ST, this one actually makes use of GEM! I managed to transliterate a nontrivial Pascal program into Modula-2 and got it to run without too many problems. Since the system is stored on two disks, it is EXTREMELY tedious to use it with a single drive system. I would not recommend getting this program unless: 1. you have a hard disk 2. you have a double-sided drive 3. you have two single-sided drives 4. you have a single drive but can develop your programs elsewhere It appears that most if not all system routines (GEM, VDI, etc) can be called from Modula-2 programs. The system is not copy protected. It has usually been my experience that copy-protected programs are usually not worth copying... Syntax errors are for the most part understandable, and the editor and the compiler are fixed up so that the editor will flag the syntax errors that the compiler discovered. Although the syntax error messages are plentiful and meaningful, there are only a very small number of runtime errors, which tend not to let you know what went wrong. The code generated by the compiler is small and fast, and according to the manual, some primitive optimizations are performed (short-circuiting of Boolean expressions). The linker allows true seperate compilation. One can create libraries that are compiled only once, and then linked into programs using their routines. Eric Terrell CSNET address terrell@OHIO-STATE