kim@analog.UUCP (Kim Helliwell ) (01/31/85)
Having just received and tried my copy of MegaMax C, I feel obliged to
jump into the fray over the question of how good (or bad) it is. This
is not an in-depth review, or anything--I've had the package less than
24 hours! I also had a chance to try out Consulair C for a weekend, and
was about to buy it (I had put down a deposit on it) but changed my mind
when I saw the note about MegaMax, because availability of floats is
quite important to me.
As someone pointed out a few days ago, the package is fairly complete--
including a linker and librarian, as well as Apple's editor and the Rmaker.
The compiler runs fast, as does the linker, and you get a double-clickable
generic application icon (named 'a.out') on the desktop when you exit to the
Finder.
The editor has transfer options to either the compiler or the Rmaker, and
from the compiler, you have the option of exiting to any application on
the mounted disks (presumably, the preferred choice is to the linker if the
compile is error free, otherwise back to the editor). A list of compiler
errors is generated and displayed to the screen and written to a file, so
that it's accessible to the editor for the correction phase.
The user interface is not nearly as smooth as that of Consulair C. Exiting
from the editor to the compiler, one still must type in the name of the
file to be compiled, even though it may have been the file open in the
editor. Same goes for the transition to the Linker--with the added
proviso that you can't have any spaces in your file name (or volume name!),
since the input to the linker is a space-separated list of files, and there
is no way to escape the spaces. Also, the file list MUST fit on one line,
so large programming projects will have to rely on user-created libraries a lot.
The output of the linker is always a file called "a.out", and you have to
get back to the Finder to change the name.
The transition back to the editor requires you to re-open the file you were
working on. In contrast, the Consulair C automatically exits you back to
the editor after an unsuccessful compile with the source file AND the
error list file open!
The complaint on the net about the nonconventional names for toolbox traps
is true--they are all in lower case.
The documentation is not great, but reasonable. I consider it better than
the Consulair documentation--it seemed more lucid to me. The first part
is nicely done with MacWrite. The standard library routines are documented
in the rather telegraphic form familiar to unix hackers. This is not bad;
I wish someone would do the Toolbox trap calls this way! The toolbox
traps are listed (together with some necessary additional calls to overcome
the unix-to-mac interface problems), but the quality of the printing in
this section leaves a bit to be desired.
Several sample programs are included. None of them are too useful, but there
is enough there to get you going. At least one of the programs has some
toolbox calls, so you can see how to do that.
All in all, I am pleased with it. I hope for some improvements to the
interface, but I think the current setup is something I can work with
quite happily. If you have used SUMACC and want to convert to MegaMax,
I suppose knocking down the upper-case letters in the trap calls would be
tedious. My approach would be to write a filter to do that for me. I
personally prefer NOT to have to spend so much time hitting and releasing
the shift key, as well as *REMEMBERING* which letters to capitalize! There
doesn't seem to be any clear rule for what to capitalize and what not to.
So I am glad it's all lower case for the trap calls.
The best part is it is $300, as opposed to Consulair's $425 (+25), and
includes floating point types, which Consulair doesn't. Once when I
talked to somebody at Consulair, he told me that floating point would
come out sometime this year and would probably be an extra $100! I think
a schlocky user interface is a reasonable price to pay for a $225 savings
plus the more immediate floating point access.
Kim Helliwell
{hplabs,menlo70}!analog!kimmike@smu.UUCP (02/06/85)
The new Megamax release has clickable file name menus instead of the "type in the name" approach. Also, (this is neat) there is now a batch facility which allows the edit-compile-link to be placed in a command file. Also, one can now tell the linker the name of the executable (doesn't have to be a.out). Mike McNally