rre@ihlpg.ATT.COM (Roger Espinosa) (09/09/87)
Hi. Yes, it's time for another question: Does anybody out there use the Kyan Pascal software? I've seen evidence of people using Kix, which Kyan also makes, so I'm curious. Currently I'm using Apple UCSD Pascal, but am annoyed by the APDA expansion products (Desktop Toolkit, namely), and the fact that Apple seems to have dropped UCSD Pascal from its product list and support (instead backing fully everything that's GS-specific). Kyan seems to have some eye-catching products that SEEM TO BE tested and final versions (no first draft deals). And even Kyan Pascal with the Systems Utilities Toolkit and the Advanced Graphics Toolkit (dhires) costs $175 from Kyan itself, cheaper than UCSD did at the mailorder house. I seem to recall an A+ review of Kyan Pascal that was, well, reaky, but that was way back in 1984 so I wonder if things have changed. Eagerly awaiting... Thanks, Roger Espinosa "Stack Overflow S#1 P#4 etc" -- Roger R. Espinosa Live from the Rabbit Ranch ihnp4!ihlpg!rre
JZEM@MARIST.BITNET ("William J. Joel") (09/10/87)
I planned to use Kyan Pascal recently for a simple CAI project, but had to revert to Applesoft BASIC as Kyan Pascal showed a very interesting bug ... in some cases variables that were declared could not be assigned new values. I did a software swap with the distributer but the second copy had the same bug. I guess it's still _reaky_.
mw22+@ANDREW.CMU.EDU (Michael Alan Wertheim) (09/11/87)
I use an old, old (pre-2.0) version of Kyan Pascal. I haven't seen any of the newer versions, so some of these bugs may have been fixed (I would hope). 1.) The NEW procedure doesn't work. No matter what kind of structure you try to allocate memory for, it always gives you 400 bytes. For example, the following programs do exactly the same thing: PROGRAM P1; TYPE PTR:^NODE; NODE:RECORD A:BOOLEAN END; VAR P:PTR; I:INTEGER; BEGIN FOR I:= 1 TO 100 DO NEW (P) END. PROGRAM P2; TYPE PTR:^NODE; NODE:RECORD A:ARRAY [1..100] OF ARRAY [1..100] OF REAL END; VAR P:PTR; I:INTEGER; BEGIN FOR I:= 1 TO 100 DO NEW (P) END. Both programs crash at I = 100 or so. Even if a boolean value takes up a whole word of memory, I should be up in the thousands before Program1 crashes. A single node form Program2 is too big to fit into memory, but it seems like you can create 100 of them before you run out of memory. 2.) Very long string literals (including comments) will crash the compiler. i.e. you try to compile a program and the compiler crashes into the monitor. As I said before, these bugs have probably been fixed. No flames form current Kyan Pascal users please. Michael Wertheim Carnegie Mellon University Pittsburgh, PA Arpa: mw22@andrew.cmu.edu Bitnet: mw22@cmuccvma UUCP: ...!{seismo, ucbvax, harvard}!andrew.cmu.edu!mw22#