Path: utzoo!utgpu!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!rutgers!cs.utexas.edu!yale!eagle!bparsia
From: bparsia@eagle.wesleyan.edu
Newsgroups: comp.sys.mac.programmer
Subject: $$$ & THINK Pascal 3.0
Message-ID: <12004@eagle.wesleyan.edu>
Date: 17 Mar 90 17:19:33 GMT
Lines: 51

The "improvements" to THINK Pascal sound nice, but the upgrade price is a
little steep.

In fact, the new list price (I haven't seen the street price yet, maybe because
it isn't on the street) seems rather, extremely high.

When I bought Lightspeed Pascal v. 1.11 last fall, I paid maybe $65 for it. It
was a nice package at a nice price. Fortunatly, I bought it late enough to
qualify for a free upgrade to 2.0, otherwise, another $49. 

Now, the reason I bought it is that I like to mess around. It's a year and a
half later and I am still unable to write Macintosh software (have had no time
to learn, maybe next summer), however, I still do enjoy mucking about with it.

Now, if LSP had cost $200-300, I would have never bought it. I probably would
have (reluctantly) gone with ZBasic.

The lesson: I think there is a market for a relativly low cost Pascal compiler.
I have heard of Macintosh Pascal (by Symantic) but have also heard that a)it's
interpreted--not so good, and b)very little else, it's not advertised and to my
knowledge no mail-order has it. 

Conclusion: I think it is a mistake for Symantic to give up on the low-end,
dabbler market. Or even to squeeze the slightly less dabbling market (i.e. the
people who write and release freeware, or even shareware). The upgrade prices
are definatly too high.
	However, the upgrade *is* quite substantial (I mean, and entire class
library? that's not so bad if one compares to MacApp), and deserves a good
price. Thus the dilemma.

My suggestion: Why not separate things up a bit? For example, I would really
like to have Rez and DeRez (a bunch of listings of source code use this format
rather than RMaker, and I, personally with my dabbler mentality, lack the
knowledge to port from Rez to Rmaker, or even to use the Rez code to create the
resources properly in ResEdit. Thus, Symantic, you wouldn't have to give up the
effort it took to develop TCL, but I wouldn't have to pay $69 (or whatever)
upgrade fee, when what I mainly want is Rez (I'm no where near doing OOP
programming; when I am, I'll be happy to pay)(note too, the cost of the upgrade
is near the cost of what I originally paid, yet I will most likely use little
of the new functionality).

I don't know how much of a market there is for "my" end of it. I wouldn't mind
doing a little survay (posting this to comp.sys.mac) to find out. I think there
might be a nice market, esp. among students (like myself).

If this could be handled with educational discounts on *upgrades* (something
which is sore lacking, I believe) that could be fine, as well.

Looking forward to the response (esp. from you Rich).

Bijan J. Parsia