info-mac@uw-beaver (info-mac) (07/17/84)
From: David.Anderson@CMU-CS-G.ARPA Apple does have 2 different Pascals under development. One is a very nicely thought out interpretive environment with a coupled editor and debugger; this is MacPascal from Think Technologies. I've experimented with an early release, and it seemed nearly ready to me. This is the one reviewed in BYTE (great for educational environments, but kind of slow and too little memory for serious development). The other Pascal is a real development system that Apple is working on for the end of the year. That's all I know about it.
info-mac@uw-beaver (01/18/85)
From: SAROYAN%LLL@LLL-MFE.ARPA
From: Allyn Saroyan <SAROYAN@LLL.MFE>
To: info-mac@LLL.MFE
Recently, Werner Uhrig forwarded a Mac Pascal review by Kim Helliwell.
In that review Kim made two statements:
"If you really want to go the whole nine yards
and do a full Mac environment application, you
will need a 512K machine, no question. "
"Overall I rate the product about 8 on a scale of
10. " ... "The memory problem will be solved when
I get my memory upgrade. "
I wish the memory problem would go away but it will not. There is some
kind of memory restriction in Mac Pascal which causes it to die during
compilation when 7 percent of Lisa memory or 17 percent of 512K Mac
memory is filled with source code. Apple was informed of this about
a month ago. No action has been taken as far as I know.
I very much like Mac Pascal and wish I could use it to create
Macintosh-style programs. However, the memory problem prevents
one from doing so. It's very frustrating to upgrade to 512K and find
that Mac Pascal recognizes the extra memory but will not let you use it.
Allyn Saroyan
-------info-mac@uw-beaver (01/18/85)
From: Vincent Manis <manis%ubc.csnet@csnet-relay.arpa>
I've been evaluating Mac Pascal for a proposed microcomputer lab
for introductory computer science here. While I'm really impressed
with its capabilities, performance and reliability appear to be
unacceptable for introductory students. Here's a consolidated list
of things I've read on Info-Mac and things I've discovered for
myself which make me hesitant to endorse it as an introductory
tool:
I) Reliability problems
a) MacPascal disks become unbootable after a number of uses.
b) If a program is too large, one gets a system error with
no ability to save the program.
c) The version I got (in a nice Apple box and all) still seems
to have a number of bugs.
II) Performance
a) It takes a *long* time to compile largish programs.
b) Programs are recompiled from scratch each time they're run.
III) Design
a) It's unreasonable to expect a beginning student to be able
to manipulate windows sensibly. Unless you're careful,
you may not have execution windows on the screen, and therefore
not know whether your program is working.
b) The 'Pause' mechanism is clumsy, and doesn't always seem to
get listened to.
IV) Copy protection
a) You can't put it (reliably) on a hard disk.
b) If you're running on a 1-drive system, you (or at least an
unskilled user) will end up writing on the original disk,
which strikes me as dangerous (especially given some stories
of drives which eat disks).
c) You end up having to diddle the system folder on the distribution
disk if you want to change fonts (see b above).
As a result of these complaints, I'm fairly loath to recommend Mac Pascal
in the introductory courses (I'm already seriously considering MRI's
Modula-2 in the second-year course). If Apple/Think plan to fix these
problems, fine. If not, maybe there's some truth in the rumours that
Borland International is going to release Turbo Pascal for the Mac.