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...