[comp.sys.apple2] How much is enough?

tyler@eniac.seas.upenn.edu (Tyler W Phillips) (12/16/90)

	I have Orca Pascal, and I am wondering how much memory you need to make
this thing at all useful.  I currently have 1.25 megs, but whenever I attempt
to write a program that is more than about 40 lines long, I run out of memory. 
I can't even compile half of the demos on the demo disk.  Am I doing something
wrong, or is this thing just a rediculous memory hog.  As it is now, I have
absolutely no use for it.  Any help is appreciated.

-Tyler W. Phillips (tyler@eniac.seas.upenn.edu)

lang@rex.cs.tulane.edu (Raymond Lang) (12/16/90)

In <34834@netnews.upenn.edu> tyler@eniac.seas.upenn.edu (Tyler W Phillips) writes:


>       I have Orca Pascal, and I am wondering how much memory you need to make
>this thing at all useful.  I currently have 1.25 megs, but whenever I attempt
>to write a program that is more than about 40 lines long, I run out of memory.
>I can't even compile half of the demos on the demo disk.  Am I doing something
>wrong, or is this thing just a rediculous memory hog.  As it is now, I have
>absolutely no use for it.  Any help is appreciated.

>-Tyler W. Phillips (tyler@eniac.seas.upenn.edu)


1.25 megs is enough, but you'll be cramped if you're trying to use
the Prizm desktop environment. Try using the text shell, that should
free up about a quarter meg or so. Also, make sure you don't have any
memory allocated to /RAM5 from the control panel.

The text shell isn't as much fun to use as the Prizm desktop, but you
can do more from the shell and it's more reliable. Prizm has some known
bugs which Byteworks is in the process of fixing right now. Expect an
upgrade for Prizm within the next few months and an upgrade to Pascal
shortly after that.

If you must use the desktop, don't compile to memory. Compile to disk
instead.

Also, if you haven't run into this already, one of the more well known
bugs in the Pascal compiler has to do with character variables. Two
bytes are allocated for them, but the READ and READLN functions do
not clear the high bytes. You should make an assignment to character
variables before READing them if you're going to do comparisons on them.
An assignment properly clears the high byte of char variables.

Ray
lang@rex.cs.tulane.edu