JEFFS@MAINE.BITNET (06/08/86)
Two recent queries were about Modula-2 compilers for the IBM PC and compatibles. Nicholas Chrissakis asked about native code generation and presence of a symbolic debugger, and Jim Hayes asked about >64K address space and ability to create EXE files. I use the Logitech compiler, which does meet those needs. It creates native code comparable in effiency to the C and Pascal compilers for the PC (in some cases comparing very favorably), and runs with or without an 8087. Debugging can be done with a symbolic 'post mortem dump' debugger, or interactively with a run-time symbolic debugger as the program executes. Both are very good. Data areas can be arbitrarily large (I believe that a single ARRAY or record cannot exceed 64K bytes), so the entire PC address space can be used. The compiler and linker normally produce a LOD file that is run under a small executor module, but a utility program is provided that creates a true EXE file from the LOD file. I am unclear which of these things is part of the 'base' compiler package, and which are add-ons, since I have all of them. The overall system is more than adequate for producing real programs. It is professional and reliable. I have used the Modula Research Corporation M-code interpreter and found it to be too slow for humans to use. Their recently announced native code compiler presumably fixes this, but I haven't tried it. I played briefly with the ITC compiler, but could not stand the awful syntax editor one must use (short of explicitly importing and exporting files created externally). The initial version especially was quite buggy, and was known to destroy disk directories. I looked briefly at Release 2, but not enough to see if the fatal errors still occurred. I have no business relationships with the above vendors; the opinions expressed above are my own... Jeff Savit (JEFFS@MAINE, or jsavit on BIX)