godden@GMR.CSNET (Kurt Godden) (01/02/86)
At last...an 8-bit question! Can anyone discuss the relative merits or otherwise of OSS's ACTION! cartridge vs. their C/65 compiler. Which would you recommend I purchase? I know that C/65 requires MAC/65, but that's ok. I'm more interested in things like ease of programming in one lang vs. the other, development environment provided, known bugs, speed, etc. I'm leaning toward C/65 mainly because learning C at least would be of use with other machines, whereas ACTION! is presumably of no use outside 8-bit Atariland. I have an Atari 800. Posting replies to the net would probably be appropriate here. Thanks. Kurt Godden godden.gmr@csnet-relay I have no opinions, but if I did they could be yours for a price.
camis..ajb@MITRE.ARPA (01/02/86)
I've had my ACTION! cart for about 6 months now. I can't compare it with C65, having never used it. To my mind, however, ACTION! could be the very best programming environment on the Atari. The editor is very convenient to use. The compiler is super fast. Try compiling 300-500 lines of anything on any machine as fast as ACTION! can (just a very few seconds) on the Atari. Although I've never examined the machine code emitted by ACTION!, my programs tend to run blindingly fast. I've written programs in ACTION! for which I would previously have resorted to assembler. The documentation supplied is excellent, and the syntax is easy to learn. The only feature that I can think of which is present in C and missing in ACTION! is recursion. C is a general purpose large language (relatively speaking, no flames please). ACTION! is a tiny language, well designed for execution in a (specifically) 6502 processor environment. For my money, ACTION! is the best choice to most completely exploit the Atari environment. If anyone out there in net-land is interested we could try some benchmarks comparing ACTION! with any other Atari (or other manufacturer) high or low level language.
gat@inuxd.UUCP (G Taylor) (01/03/86)
> Can anyone discuss the relative merits or otherwise of OSS's ACTION! cartridge > vs. their C/65 compiler. Which would you recommend I purchase? I know that > C/65 requires MAC/65, but that's ok. I'm more interested in things like > ease of programming in one lang vs. the other, development environment > provided, known bugs, speed, etc. I'm leaning toward C/65 mainly because > learning C at least would be of use with other machines, whereas ACTION! > is presumably of no use outside 8-bit Atariland. I have an Atari 800. > There has been considerable recent discussion of the merits of ACTION! To summarize, buy ACTION! if you have any real interest in programming the Atari, otherwise stick with Atari Basic. Mild Flame! Before I encountered ACTION! I was able to use a friend's system who had the MAC/65 and C/65 conglomeration. I was appalled by the list of C constructs not supported by C/65, e.g. "for statements, do-while statements, switch statement," and all of the more exotic C constructs. That was a bad start, but I found it to be quirky as well, e.g. keywords had to be in UPPER CASE to be recognized. Finally, the bother of shifting between editors, compiler, assembler to get an executable was a real pain (this is one of the *main advantages* of ACTION! -- it is easy to do this with ACTION!). I encourage you to learn C, but I have yet to find a C in the Atari 800 world where you will learn anything very useful except frustration tolerance. Glen A. Taylor AT&T (Consumer Products Division) Indianapolis, IN (317) 845-3709 inuxd!gat
Felton.PA@XEROX.ARPA (01/03/86)
>Can anyone discuss the relative merits or otherwise of OSS's ACTION! cartridge >vs. their C/65 compiler. I have both and wish I could give a detailed comparison, but, in truth I haven't used the C compiler much at all (this is by choice, not chance). On the other hand I have used the ACTION! compiler extensively. The way I see it, if you want portability then use the C compiler. If you want the most powerful high level language available for the Atari then use ACTION!. What makes ACTION! so powerful is that it was designed specifcally for the Atari, so it provides better access to the Atari's special features. Another big plus is that ACTION provides such a nice programming environment. It's integrated editor and compiler and it's fast compile times make it a joy to use. With C/65 you must ... 1. load an editor 2. edit and save your program 3. load C/65 and compile your program 4. load Mac/65 and assemble your program 5. run your program With ACTION! ( with small programs ) 1. edit program 2. compile (less than 5 sec.) 3. run With big ACTION! programs the source code must be saved to disk and compiled from there. This is still much faster than C/65. On the other hand ACTION! is only available for the Atari so for portability it is as bad as you can get. However, I have been told that Clinton Parker is working on a version of ACTION! for the Atari ST. I hope this helps and I hope that someone who has used C/65 more extensively can give it's good points (such a person will be harder to find because ACTION! out sells C/65 100:1). JOHN