[comp.lang.modula2] M2Amiga

jaervinen@dcc.dec.com (CIM International Engineering) (11/13/87)

  
  
A couple of days ago I received the M2Amiga demo disk.

It seemed very nice; the demo disk contains a demo version of the
compiler (able to compile small modules), linker and a version of
uEMACS (called M2Emacs) and some libraries (InOut etc.) plus a few
demo programs (like TILT coverted to M2).

It does run in 512 k, but you can have almost nothing in RAMdisk then,
making it obviously rather slow (but that's really not the compiler's
fault). It's still faster than TDI, though, especially linking... and
you can save load time if you have several modules to compile, the
compiler prompts for a new file to compile after having finished
(or you can give all the file names on the command line in CLI).

I managed to compile a few little modules in RAM (having the source
and .SYM files on RAMdisk, but starting the compiler from floppy).
The compilation was real fast, somewhere about 5 times faster than TDI
(just a rough gut feeling) excluding the time to load the compiler from
floppy.

I also liked the error messages (you actually get runtime error
messages!). The editor reads in an error message file and the compiler
produces a file with pointers to errors, so you can just hit a function
key while editing the source and the cursor is positioned to the error
and the error message is displayed on the last line of the screen.
The messages seemed quite comprehensive and clear, and were usually
actually pointing to almost the right spot in the source..

This is all based just on the demo disk (no documentation comes with
it) but I think I'll buy the real stuff... I've looked at many Amiga 
compilers, and this looks the best one so far (I hate C so I'm not 
totally unbiased... :-) though I have hardly used Modula on any machine 
so far (but lots of Pascal).

A+L Meyer-Vogt informs me that the symbolic debugger is available next
year.


Usual disclaimer: I have no connection whatever blah blah blah...