unbent@ecsvax.UUCP (01/14/84)
<>
Does anyone out there in netland have any experience
with the different BASIC compilers available for the TRS-80
Mod III? I've heard some unhappy things about BASCOM.
There's also something called ZBASIC from SIMUTEK which looks
pretty good in their ads. Any information about either of
these, or another, would be appreciated.
--Jay Rosenberg
{...mcnc!ecsvax!unbent}mjg@ecsvax.UUCP (01/15/84)
This is a follow up to Jay Rosenberg's request for information on
Basic Compilers for the TRS80 Mod III. I can report some experience
with Microsoft's BASCOM. The first thing to say is that as far as I can
tell, Mirosoft is no longer supporting it. I bought it 2 years ago for
the Model I and that is the only version they have ever produced. It was
designed specifically for the Model I and they have never produced a Mod
III version - again, as far as I can tell, because of Tandys antics with
their DOSs whereby each successive DOS was incompatible with the previous
ones - specifically things like directory end of file markers etc.
Since it came out patches have become available from various sources for
(apart from TRSDOS 2.3 the original) LDOS Mod 1/3, NEWDOS 80 V2 Mod 1/3,
DOS-PLUS 3.5. Once applied, the patches for DOS+ 3.5 also work on 3.4.
So far I have not heard of anything for TRSDOS 1.3 on the Model III or
for Multidos - can anybody shed any light here?.
My experience with actually using it has been nothing but good - I have
used it mainly on one very large program which did a lot of string
searching, comparison and file I/O (in fact a 68000 cross assembler) and
I found speedups in the range 5-10 times compared with interpreted
mode.
In my opinion its much better than Radio
Shacks which requires you to rewrite your program - it's incompatible
with standard TRS80 basic in many ways. The sad thing is that
you can't buy it anymore. I have a friend who has been hunting
high and low for a copy to buy but no-one could help. Twice he
called Microsoft who put him on hold for 20 minutes at a time.
Finally he talked to someone in the know at Microsoft who said
that as they were no longer distributing it the only thing he
could do would be to find someone with an original copy and
duplicate it. Then, he was to send them a letter confirming his
action. He was not to resell the program for profit but he could
use it and distribute the results without any restriction. WOW!
Has anyone else had any experience of this? Particularly I would
like to hear from anyone with patches for TRSDOS 1.3.
Mike Gingell
(....mcnc!ecsvax!mjg)