rs.miller@pro-newfrontier.UUCP (Randy Miller) (04/17/89)
Mr. Shankar, The only disassembler I know that is shareware for the IIGS is the disassembler that comes with LISA 816 from HAL Labs. The only OTHER 816 disassembler I know of is good old Sourceror in the Merlin 816 package. Randy Miller rs.miller@pro-newfrontier rs.miller@pro-harvest
edward@ucbarpa.Berkeley.EDU (Edward Wang) (04/18/89)
A disassembler also comes with Orca/M. It's interactive and lets you declare data regions of different types, set labels, and save the output in the assembler format. While on the subject, what are people's opinions of Orca? It seems pretty complete, comes with a nice shell, and so on, but the assembler is slow, and the editor hard to use. How does it compare with Merlin? (I got Orca mostly becase it came on a 3 1/2 disk.) For that matter, what's a good editor for the Apple (public domain, shared, or even for money)? Is there one configurable enough to behave like vi or emacs? Edward
hartkopf@tramp.Colorado.EDU (HARTKOPF JEFFREY M) (04/18/89)
In article <28817@ucbvax.BERKELEY.EDU> edward@ucbarpa.Berkeley.EDU.UUCP (Edward Wang) writes: >While on the subject, what are people's opinions of Orca? >It seems pretty complete, comes with a nice shell, and so on, >but the assembler is slow, and the editor hard to use. >How does it compare with Merlin? (I got Orca mostly becase >it came on a 3 1/2 disk.) .... I'd also like some opinions on the Orca software (Desktop, /M, Pascal, etc.) as compared to APW. I'm thinking seriously about purchasing a programming shell and languages, but I'm not sure which is best. Suggestions? I've seen lots of ads for Orca stuff but none for APW... Thanks a lot. -- Jeff Hartkopf
gwyn@smoke.BRL.MIL (Doug Gwyn) (04/18/89)
In article <8199@boulder.Colorado.EDU> hartkopf@tramp.Colorado.EDU (HARTKOPF JEFFREY M) writes: >I'd also like some opinions on the Orca software (Desktop, /M, Pascal, etc.) >as compared to APW. I'm thinking seriously about purchasing a programming >shell and languages, but I'm not sure which is best. Suggestions? At the moment, if you want to program the IIGS in C, you have to get APW anyway. (I have heard that ByteWorks will be coming out with an ORCA C compiler soon.) Fortunately the ORCA DeskTop environment supports APW C. The editor that comes with APW appears to have been modeled after some brain-dead VAX/VMS or AppleWorks editor and is to my taste practically unusable. The ORCA DeskTop editor is much more reasonable. ORCA Pascal supports source-level debugging under the ORCA DeskTop (as will ORCA C), which may make it the best choice at present. Stay away from TML Pascal, as it violates several Apple IIGS conventions and will in the long run produce more trouble than benefit. Make sure you have a hard disk! APW program development is just too painful on small disks.
STEIN@UCONNVM.BITNET (Alan Stein) (04/19/89)
>In article <28817@ucbvax.BERKELEY.EDU> edward@ucbarpa.Berkeley.EDU.UUCP (Edward > Wang) writes: >>While on the subject, what are people's opinions of Orca? >>It seems pretty complete, comes with a nice shell, and so on, >>but the assembler is slow, and the editor hard to use. >>How does it compare with Merlin? (I got Orca mostly becase >>it came on a 3 1/2 disk.) .... > >I'd also like some opinions on the Orca software (Desktop, /M, Pascal, etc.) >as compared to APW. I'm thinking seriously about purchasing a programming >shell and languages, but I'm not sure which is best. Suggestions? I've seen >lots of ads for Orca stuff but none for APW... > >Thanks a lot. > >-- Jeff Hartkopf APW and Orca are essentially the same. Both were designed by ByteWorks and the only significant difference I know of is that some macros have different names. (Why did they do that?) I have Orca's desktop and have found that, while it's fun to play with, it's generally easier to use Orca's shell environment, which is basically the same as the APW environment. Although I haven't used many assemblers, I've been pleased with Orca/M, although the documentation leaves something to be desired. Alan H. Stein | stein@uconnvm (Bitnet) Department of Mathematics | 71545,1500 (CompuServe) University of Connecticut | ah.stein (GEnie) 32 Hillside Avenue | stein%uconnvm.bitnet@mitvma.mit.edu (Internet) Waterbury, CT 06710 | {psuvax1 or mcvax }UCONNVM.BITNET!STEIN (UUCP) (203) 757-1231 |
blochowi@cat28.CS.WISC.EDU (Jason Blochowiak) (04/19/89)
I think the original question was the 8 bit Orca vs. Merlin. Merlin does come on a 3.5" disk (at least the more recent versions). Merlin is nice for small development work, but starts to be something of a pain for larger projects (IMHO). As far as APW vs. Orca for the //gs goes, if I remember right, there's more of a difference between them than the macros (a few utility programs worth of difference), but they are the same basic package (things written for one will work with the other one). As to why the macros are different, I'd imagine it's because "ph2" is more cryptic than "PushWord", and Apple seems to prefer things that are less cryptic (more verbose :( ). Not that anyone who understands 6502 should be able to figure out what ph2 does... Matter of philosophy, I guess. From what I saw of the Desktop, it's nice, but it's not fast enough (sound familiar?), even though it is quick compared to most desktop programs. I despise Pascal, so I won't comment on that (lack of knowledge). APW C isn't real great. Although I haven't verified it, it's supposed generate buggy code for x += 1.0; where x is a float. The printf() function is huge (hello.c compiles into somewhere ~30k), and the code isn't particularly efficient. The memory model it uses is reasonable for most things, but it can be a pain. Oh, one thing I saw it do: compile x = y * 5 * 10; into two multiplications and an assignment (why code it that way? In this particular case, I was using a #define'd constant and a hard coded number). Anyways, it works (most of the time). ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Jason Blochowiak (blochowi@garfield.cs.wisc.edu) "Not your average iconoclast..." ------------------------------------------------------------------------------
kadickey@phoenix.Princeton.EDU (Kent Andrew Dickey) (04/19/89)
Since everyone seems to have the opinion that there is something seriously wrong with TML Pascal (but without any specifics), I will fill in what I know about it. I am taking a CS course that requires programs to be written in Pascal-- so I decided to buy TML. I'd also like to get a decent C-compiler, but 1) they are a bit expensive and 2) everyone seems to agree that they are quite slow. TML Pascal 1.50 (the version I have...it would seem to be the latest) allows very simple access to Toolbox routines, easy creation of NDAs and CDAs, and DEFINITELY encourages the programmer to use the GS programming environment (in fact, a bit too much. A 'standard' Pascal program has its default window to be the SHR screen--which scrolls pitifully slow. To use text, you must start up the TextTools toolset and deal with it all yourself!). It has a few significant bugs. I can't seem to print my program out properly on my Imagewriter II--lines seem to get lost at random. This could be partly my fault (I've deleted most of the GS/OS system disk since I've placed it on my /ROM drive). But, the editor environment sometimes 'crashes' at random--with the crash usually resulting in the mouse still moving around, but none of the menus will open up (and it isn't crashed into the monitor...). There is a neat feature of 'Check Syntax' which checks your program for obvious syntactic mistakes without taking the extra time to actually compile it--but using Check Syntax makes a crash 100 times more likely...so I don't use it. It compiles relatively fast (6,000 line/min? I'll do some timings later), and produces reasonable code (I wrote a quicksort procedure with it that took just 3.6 seconds to sort 10,000 random integers. Handcoding the same procedure in assembly, with some neat tricks, only cut the time down to 1.51 seconds...so I'd consider that fairly good code). A neat feature is 'keyboard break' which allows you to hit ctrl-C at ANY TIME to stop a program (though, obviously, this makes your program huge and runs about 5 times slower...but it's a very handy feature). The most unfortunate aspect of the program is floating point numbers. All floating point calculations are done in Extended format (10 BYTES!!) and the program doesn't seem to properly support single of double sizes (compiling a program which has Singles or Doubles always leads to a link-time error of 'No _vardbl defined' or something like that--indicating that something important is missing.) Since all real calculations are done in 10-byte mode, and I can't use singles or doubles for storage even, arrays of reals become HUGE and calculations are slow. TML supposedly (and from the times, I believe it) uses SANE for everything, so getting a coprocessor would make it fly. TML Pascal allows variables to be placed in different segments (and code in different ones too), which the system loader then places in memory at the proper places when it's loaded. Thus, with a few extra declarations, individual arrays up to 64K are easy to handle. A *VERY* annoying 'feature' of the compiler is this: I've declared VALUE to be a Real. I accidentally have a statement VALUE := 0; (Instead of the proper 0.0) The compiler doesn't flag this as an error--so you'd think it would properly convert the 0 integer value to a real--but it doesn't! It just places the INTEGER VALUE 0 into VALUE, which isn't 0.0 at all (the upper bytes aren't changed!) This is always a very hard bug to track down...the compiler should flag this. That's my review of TML Pascal...if anyone has anything to add, please do so. Kent Dickey (KADICKEY@phoenix.Princeton.EDU)
dseah@wpi.wpi.edu (David I Seah) (04/25/89)
In article <2584@puff.cs.wisc.edu> blochowi@cat28.CS.WISC.EDU (Jason Blochowiak) writes: > As far as APW vs. Orca for the //gs goes, if I remember right, there's >more of a difference between them than the macros (a few utility programs >worth of difference), but they are the same basic package (things written for >one will work with the other one). As to why the macros are different, I'd >imagine it's because "ph2" is more cryptic than "PushWord", and Apple seems to >prefer things that are less cryptic (more verbose :( ). Not that anyone who >understands 6502 should be able to figure out what ph2 does... Matter of >philosophy, I guess. I once sent mail to Mike Westerfield about the macros, because I was using Orca/M and my friend was using APW. He said something to the effect that Apple wasn't interested in providing standard macros between the products, so he was trying to buy them from them. Dave Seah (dseah@wpi.wpi.edu, dseah@wpi.bitnet)