jww@bonnie.UUCP (Joel West) (04/25/85)
I would like to pass on two tidbits, quoting from a local newspaper,
on Modula-2 for the Mac and faster Apple Pascal:
"SofTech upgrades p-System software:
Performance speed on Apple II computers increased"
San Diego Tribune, April 22 financial pages
(Quoting Benjamin Goodwin, president of SofTech microsystems)
...new products on the way, Goodwin said, will be a "new language product"
and an "integrated software package" in July (both for the IBM PC
line) and "a Modula II [sic] product" this fall.
....Goodwin said SoftTech Micro is negotiating to aquire the rights
to bankrupt Volition Systems' Advanced System Editor (ASE), as
well as its implementation of Niklaus Wirth's Modula II computer
language...
Also, in the article,
...[the p-System software]got a reputation from program developers as
being particularly slow in execution, especially on the Apple, which,
some said, "ran slow as molasses." [Goodwin] agrees: "We lost contact
with the customer and input of what they wanted in a product."
But that's all changing, he said: "We're speeding up performance
on the Apple II family by a magnitude of 20 to 30 times."
...Numerou "overhead reductions" [Ed: quotes mine] have taken place
at SofTech Micro, including employee layoffs....the payroll [has]
been reduced from a peak 141 ... to a current 32 employees.
Other sections note that the p-System promised portability but died
when MS-DOS became a standard; that SofTech has a 15-year contract with
UC Regents in exchange for royalties; and that SofTech discovered that
licensing the p-System to vendors (DG, IBM, DEC..) was not the same
as selling copies. Also, SofTech "wrote off $1.8 million in bad debts
from Osborne" [computers, not adam].
-----------------personal comment--------------------
The Volition deal would make sense, since Volition is about 10 miles
southwest of SofTech and the two are, to my knowledge, the only two
companies to do Macintosh language development in San Diego.
(There's also Telesoft in town, but that's entirely Ada.)
Second, the UCSD Pascal for the Mac ("MacAdvantage") benchmarked
in my test between 30-100 as slow as a compiled C. This suggests
that the new UCSD Pascal would be not a p-system at all, but a
fully compiled language.
--
Joel West (619) 457-9681
CACI, Inc. - Federal 3344 N. Torrey Pines Ct La Jolla 92037
jww@bonnie.UUCP (ihnp4!bonnie!jww)
westjw@nosc.ARPA
"The best is the enemy of the good" - A. Mullarneyjww@bonnie.UUCP (Joel West) (05/07/85)
I have an update to my earlier posting, from fa.info-mac digest #42 > ...[the p-System software]got a reputation from program developers as > being particularly slow in execution, especially on the Apple, which, > some said, "ran slow as molasses." [Goodwin] agrees: "We lost contact > with the customer and input of what they wanted in a product." > But that's all changing, he said: "We're speeding up performance > on the Apple II family by a magnitude of 20 to 30 times." ... > -----------------personal comment-------------------- > Second, the UCSD Pascal for the Mac ("MacAdvantage") benchmarked > in my test between 30-100 as slow as a compiled C. This suggests > that the new UCSD Pascal would be not a p-system at all, but a > fully compiled language. > -- > Joel West (619) 457-9681 Date: 3 May 1985 18:11:29-EDT From: jcr@Mitre-Bedford Subject: Improvements to UCSD Pascal.... After reading the above, I called Softech to check it out. Having used Apple Pascal on the IIe for about a year now, I was pretty excited at the capabilities described in this article. The performance increase described in the article comes through the use of a native code generator (NCG). For those not familiar with the p-system, an NCG is a program that takes the p-code produced by a p-system compiler and translates in into native code for the processor it is to run on. The translation is not complete; some portions of p-code are left intact and still must be interpreted. However, the increase in execution speed is still quite significant. Alas, when I mentioned that I'd heard that an NCG (or some other improvement) might soon be available for the Apple II family, the man at Softech knew immediately what my source was. He said that the reporter owned a IIe and got a little overzealous in his reporting. The fact is that they currently have no plans for an improvement to pascal for the Apple II family, though he said they WERE keeping an ear open, and if demand was high enough, such a product MIGHT possibly be released in the future. However, NCGs are available (or soon will be) for several other processors. It would be interesting to compare the performance of Mac UCSD pascal using an NCG to Mac Object Pascal when both become available. Also, does anyone perhaps have statistics on UCSD pascal with an NCG on the IBM PC as compared to Turbo Pascal? Regards, --- Jeff Rogers jcr@Mitre-Bedford.ARPA -- Joel West (619) 457-9681 CACI, Inc. - Federal 3344 N. Torrey Pines Ct La Jolla 92037 jww@bonnie.UUCP (ihnp4!bonnie!jww) westjw@nosc.ARPA "The best is the enemy of the good" - A. Mullarney
rjh@calmasd.UUCP (Bob Hofkin) (05/09/85)
According to papers filed with the bankruptcy court here in San Diego, SofTech Microsystems is trying to license all of Volition's existing Modula-2 compilers. Volition claimed some months ago that they were working on a p-code compiler for the Mac, but this project apparently has been abandoned (no technical staff). I have seen Volition's native code 68000 Modula compiler running on a Stride. I believe it's CP/M-86, and nobody wants to say how much work has to be done to put it Mac on a Mac. Ben Goodwin, President of SMS, indicated no plan to hire additional technical staff if they acquire the Volition products. [credit & plug] This information was gathered recently from public, but not particularly accessible, sources by my wife, who is Managing Editor at Structured Language World (Springer-Verlag).