winkler@harvard.ARPA (Dan Winkler) (08/17/85)
When I asked about Pascal compilers, the two that most people recommended were Turbo Pascal and JRT Pascal. Turbo was characterized as very good and very cheap. JRT was characterized as free. Later, I received strong warnings that JRT is not worth the trouble and anyone's time is worth the cost of Turbo. Of course, it was too late for me because I had already started trying to compile my program with JRT. I did finally get the one program I wanted to run under JRT, but it took about 30 hours work for just a 300 line (and already debugged!) program. With a decent compiler, I should have been able to do that in 1 hour. But JRT is a very fragile compiler. For example, one bug that took me hours to find was simply that a line was too long for the compiler. Rather than giving an error message, however, it simply began spitting out garbage characters for a while and eventually crashed. Even when it does give error messages, they are not very informative. Finally, without the documentation (which is not currently archived on Simtel20), it can be very hard to do things because of the nonstandard features. For example, the way to open a sequential text file f with disk name foo for writing is: rewrite(f, 'foo', TEXT); Another example is that type text is not defined so you must use file of char. I would like to thank those of you who gave me advice and information. This network is a very valuable source of help and I don't know of anywhere else I could find a comparable resource. Thanks! Dan.