m0p@k.cc.purdue.edu (S. Kulikowski) (12/09/87)
Comparative Pascal Compilers on Mac2 Stan Kulikowski II if YOU_HAVE_USED_2_OR_MORE_PASCAL_COMPILERS_ON_A_MAC then REPLY_TO_ME; here are the Pascal compilers i have found references and reviews to for any mac (i am interested in mac2 only): Lightspeed Pascal MacUser Feb 87 MacAdvantage: UCSD Pascal Macintosh Pascal v. 2.1 TML Pascal MacUser Jun 86 Turbo Pascal MPW Pascal i spent most of this afternoon (on hold) on the phone getting through to publishers of Pascals for macs. i have taught i intro courses in programming for 10 semesters (CS-1 with Pascal) and have developed ~2000-line user interfaces with Pascal for six years in MSDOS and CPM machines. when i got to this research project in a small subdepartment, i chose the mac2 for acquisition because it would have the performance capacity to serve the people here long after i leave, but the color software will be coming sometime down the line. i have been acquiring the general software they will use later, but for my research i need a few high-level compilers (Pascal, C, and Prolog) right away to get the research data acquisition rolling quickly. ok, the mac2 arrives two weeks ago. i bought MacDraw, MacPaint, MacTerminal and MS Word as the fundamental compliment... Hypercard came free. real disappointing to install everything and the only color is the little DA apple on the command line. (yea, i know, the fragment mac in 'Welcome to the Machintosh' has some color too.) hardly what i expected from the mother company... have they lost all contact with color graphics since Apple II or is the operating system really so sluggish that it is so diffiuclt to provide color demos? from what i have heard, i guess it is the former. i have read over comp.sys.mac messages for the last month, and everybody seems to prefer Lightspeed C, and reading the reviews in various magazines, it seems that Lightspeed is the way to go there. i will get to Prologs later, this message is a request for comparative Pascal evaluations. i have some specific requirements for a Pascal compiler: A.) color graphics-- i am familiar with GKS and PHIGS primitives in other systems. i could get by with turtlegraphics, but don't want to be required to write my own bitmapping routines. i hope to make my name here in graphics programs. (* i had always refused to acquire dinky-screen macs because of the unusual monitor proportions and the the lack of color... a real step backwards from the old Apple IIs. i guess the Apple mac design team has lost touch with color programming? they have had since April and still not any color in the delivery package beyond the DA apple??? *) B.) flexible edit-- i have been working on a text in style and composition in high level languages. having had 2700+ intro students i have read a lot of bad code, so that poor style is like a sty in the eye. having learned 15+ editors, i want to customize my keyboard usage to what other 4th-generation editors allow (ie, visible block transfers, multiple RAM buffers, several windows, redefineable numeric keypad use) (* to learn another 2nd-generation Wordstar-like editor is a sty in the mind... much worse than output style insensitivity. if a syntax-insensitive editor forces a painful pretty-print, i can force my eye to look at it and write batch-level processors to convert their styles... at least i could in MSDOS. i suspect i will be able to in Apple mac opsys, given time. *) C.) runtime error-- how much time have i spent chasing flakey errors in Turbo Pascal? i usually don't write data-intensive programs, but i do a lot of natural language string processing, and i don't expect Pascal extensions to handle much beyond position-of-substring (POS func) and real-number-equivalence-values (VAL function). i have maybe six 3000-line projects on the scrap heap because debugged procedures and functions stop operating when the compiler loses track of its pointers, rendering garbage as complexity rises. (* am real tired of this crap. when you debug a part of a program it should stay debugged, and if runtime threatens it, then visible evidence should come up BEFORE kludgey rewrite is necessary. *) D.) compilers only-- i think we can forget the interpretive Machintosh Pascal which apple made native to the macs. i like the edit-compile-debug sequence. it has cognitive coherence as human minds interact in high-level conversation. interpretors interrupt if any sentence is ill-formed... no matter what train of thought: if typo then interpretor comes in with an error. to me, i would read sentence errors after train-of-thought is entered. compile-time is best minimalized, but i like the debug after i have finished procedural thought. no way around it, i guess. well, i started this diatribe with the intention to tell you what the compiler publisher techies said to me about these issues. guess, i will enter this and see what you got say pre-priori. i know what some their technical support said. PLEASE, PLEASE, PLEASE, if you reply... e-mail me a copy personally. comp.sys.mac has TOO, TOO, TOO much redundant message. if you follow-up there to this message, also post an e-mail reply to me personally as i may not be able to sort it out of 375 other messages waiting there for me in the local system which i am still new to. if there is interesting reply to me in my e-mail, i promise i will put it back on this net. let's develop some sub-post connections so this net becomes readable. there is too much painful redundancy here. net addicts like me feel convulsed in reading in the same >-quotes 40 or 50 times... stan BITNET : XM0P @ PURCCVM (* note, zero, not Oh *) SnailMail : Special Education; Purdue University; W. Lafayette, IN 47907 USENET : k.cc.purdue.edu!m0p