disd@hubcap.UUCP (Gary Heffelfinger) (01/05/89)
Those of you who have TDI Modula-2 diskettes mouldering in the back of
your disk boxes might be interested in the following.
Disclaimer 1): I have no affiliation with either TDI or M2S. This is not
intended to be a commercial posting and if you wade through it with me
to the end you will get to read some neat bitching. If this doesn't
appeal to you please feel free to leave now.
Disclaimer 2): I have no experience with any of the other Amiga M-2
products so this stuff may be old hat to Benchmark users. (I gave up on
TDI and M-2 and bought Aztec C & SDB.)
Yesterday I got a letter in the mail from a Dallas based company called
M2S Inc anouncing its M2Sprint compiler. It included a demo floppy and
a letter/order form. The letter's
salutation reads "Dear Modula-2/Amiga Owner." Despite my less than kind
opinion of TDI and its Modula-2/Amiga product, I read on. I popped
the disk in DF0:, crossed my fingers against virii, and rebooted.
Aside from some silly opening animations I was favorably impressed.
The crux of the package is the editor. It is language sensitive, that is,
it will capitalize Modula keywords for you. (A little like the
AmigaBASIC editor, only faster. :-) It will allow you to set up a
dictionary of your favorite words and will complete them for you. So if
you tire of typing ClipBlitKitchenSink() you can type ClipB, hit a
key and it'll complete it for you. This editor is reasonably smooth and
fast. I didn't spend much time working with it but I know that uEmacs
lovers will be disappointed that it is not yet-another-clone. I will
say that it does find compiler errors correctly which is something that TDI's
editor never did quite do. (Yes 3.01's editor found most errors, but it
was still a lousy editor.)
From the editor you can compile, link, and execute a Modula-2 program.
Once you use the compiler and linker, they become resident, so you'd
better have gobs of memory if you want the best performance. (512K
users need not apply, I guess.) One thing I noted is that the system
uses ARP. (The file requester tipped me off.) The compile and link
process was quick, even from floppy, but it did real well on my hard
disk. I'm convinced that if the finished product performs as well as
these demo versions, I could be quite happy writing M-2 programs with
this system. (Note that the demo is crippled in that the editor doesn't
allow saves, and only the .sym and .lnk files needed to compile the
demonstration program are included.)
The code generated seemed pretty tight to me. (This is compared to the
TDI compiler and Aztec.) The 12K source file compiled into a 7K executable.
Surprisingly enough, the sample program is fairly complex. It is a
version of the old sliding numbers puzzle which is very Amigatized.
In all it looks like a reasonably well thought out series of programs
which were designed (or redesigned) for Amiga.
Now to the promised bitching......
I was getting ready to whip out my check book, when I looked at the
order form. I was expecting a $50 or $60 upgrade fee. Har! $120 + $15
shipping and handling in the States. ($25 for our pals in Canada.)
Now this includes two ring-bound manuals (one for documents and another
for library module listings) but I've shipped whole computers for < $15.
I spent $120 or so for the lousy TDI package (release 2.00) and another
$70 or so for the update to the 3.00 disks and the improved-but-still-lousy
manual. Close to $200 for a crappy compiler package that is largely
unusable, and now they want $135 more. Har. Now I realize that M2S may not
be equivalent to TDI and that they may not be culpable for TDI's
blunders, but it doesn't change the fact that I've been burned twice
already. I'm not real thrilled about trying for three. At $60, I
might've opened my purse strings, but not at twice that.
All of that said, I want to say that those of you who are interested in
buying a Modula-2 compiler would do well to take a look at M2Sprint when
it becomes available at the end of the month. It looks competitive.
M2S also has a $185 + S&H deal for owners of other commercial M-2
compilers who wish to "upgrade".
The demo is freely distributable, so look for it on your favorite BBS.
BTW, they claim that all the tools can be run either via the editor, CLI,
Workbench or ARexx. I have tried only from the editor so I can't verify
this claim.
Gary
--
Gary R Heffelfinger - Not speaking for Clemson University
disd@hubcap.clemson.edu -- FIX the Holodeck --
Furman Paladins --- National Champs!!