V111MFQ6@UBVMS.BITNET.UUCP (11/11/87)
I have Kyan Pascal, and think it's GREAT. One of the most important things about it, to me, is that it does work with Spartados, even with that weird kix environment.. [It's weird, but it works wonderfully.. I type DOS from KIX to go to SpartaDos, and hit break to go back to KIX. It's wonderfull.. The editor that comes with it isn't that great, but I use Analog's T:EDIT anyways.. The documentation dosen't seem to have any problems regarding the kix environment, as you said, it's not that complicated, but I can't see any problems.. Maybe you got the Apple version docs by mistake or something? And YOU DON'T NEED EVERYTHING ON THE SAME DISK.. I have the most used files copied to ramdisk (130xe, 64k ramdisk), and then some stuff on drive 2, like include files, and some other things that are used rather often, or just even used, since my 2nd drive is a happy, and happy's don't work well with SpartaDos when you right to them, so.. And then my drive 1, u.s. doubler, is my workdisk, my sources, output files, everything else in between fits on there just fine.. I would imagine you would have to do alot of waiting and disk swapping if you didn't have a ramdisk, and only had one drive, but I have no problems..
john1233@csd4.milw.wisc.edu.UUCP (11/12/87)
I wouldn't go out of my way to say Kyan Pascal is great. It has MANY more faults than you give it credit for. #1 on my mind is speed. I ran the prime number benchmark and here are the results as best as I can remember them. Action! 5.2 sec. MMG BASIC compiler 5.3 sec. Kyan Pascal 8 minutes I'm not sure of the exact numbers but that is roughly the way it worked out. Next, your are 100% correct, the Kyan editor stinks!!! enough said about that. Unless you have a RAMdisk, the Kyan compiler is too hard to work with. After your are done editing, you must load the compiler. It is huge. Even with my TRAK drive in turbo mode, it still takes a while. The give it the filename to compiler and to get a soda because it take quite some time to get its job done. If there are errors, you shut off the machine and load the Action! cart for an editor and start over (see above paragraph) Those are the bad things. Here are the good ones. Kyan Pascal is a standard Pascal. All normal keywords are implemented. And (with include files) some extras like graphics commands and random access files. It has a built in assembler. Not the kind where you must get out your caclulator to figure out BNE or BEQ jumps but it has labels. It has its runtime file on the disk. You need the file LIB on the D1: to run the program but it can be appended onto the file. The manual is very good, it is a short tutorial of Pascal. A little more than my 2 cents worth but it had to be said Tom
dennett@kodak.UUCP (Charlie Dennett) (11/12/87)
A couple of years ago a friend of mine bought this. He was just learning Pascal. He suspected a few bugs in it and gave it to me to look at since I had more knowledge about Pascal. Apparently some of the examples in the manual did not work. Anyway, I played around with it and did find a couple of bugs. If I remember, the WITH construct for records just plain did not work. I had to fully qualify items in records. I think the other bug had something to do with reading and writing files. There was a 255 (or was it 256?) record limit. Does anyone know if these were, in fact, real bugs? If so, were they fixed? I think the version of Kyan Pascal was 1.something. -- Charlie Dennett | UUCP: ...!rutgers!rochester!kodak!dennett Eastman Kodak Company | Voice: 716-726-4480 901 Elmgrove Road | Company Mail: Dept 420 Technical Support Services Rochester, NY 14650 |