UD140469@NDSUVM1.BITNET (10/14/87)
Well, I finally got my Personal Pascal ver 2.0 and TDI Modula II ver 3.0 in the
mail today (the same day! what a bummer of a week to have three midterms!).
When I opened the TDI package, I found three disks, a bill, an invoice, and a
single sheet of paper titled "special intructions for release 3.00b"--no
new manual. Was there supposed to be an update for the manual? Considering
the number of errors (mostly stupid typos) I've run across in the ver 2.0
manual, I was really hoping for an update. I think the little flyer they sent
out describing the ver 3.0 upgrade had more documentation than the upgrade
itself! Thank goodness I have a copy of that flyer.... (I suppose I'll TDI
instead of waiting for responses from the net). PP looks okay, but I haven't
put it to the test yet--we'll find out this weekend when I do a data structures
programming assignment (buddy system, anyone?). I haven't decided yet whether
I like the new manual format or not--it is almost twice as big, but with the
new typestyle/size, I'll bet it doesn't have 25%-50% more info in it than the
old one (the new font is much easier to read late at night when your eyes are
about to glue themselves shut). I do like the new editor (at least what I've
seen of it). Believe it or not, it scrolls the text much faster than their
old TOS-based editor (another funny thing I noted--if you use the mouse and
hold down on the scroll arrows, it autoscrolls faster than holding down a
cursor key...). One reservation with the system is that I have this awful
feeling it's not going to work at all well with my 512 k 520 (i.e. no 202k
RAM disk). This is especially hard to swallow now that I'm not getting my
Mega 2 ( :( )--oh well, time to buy a RAM board...
Scott Udell
UD140469@NDSUVM1.BITNET
T
T. 3. rling@uw-june.UUCP (Robert Ling) (10/14/87)
TDI's manual for version 3.0 costs $5.00 extra. It's in book form rather than spiral bound. Except for the new DEFs and new compiler switches it actually contains less information. The most notable item left out is the format of the LNK files. The debugger is still a joke. It erases REF(enence) files and then tells you it can't find them. This means that you can't look at the variables of the program you're debugging. To add onto the insult they are offering the sources for the debugger for sale ($49.95). I guess they're hoping that somebody will debug it for them. - Robert Ling