Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!seismo!ukma!usenet.ins.cwru.edu!eagle!news From: chris@sarah.lerc.nasa.gov (Chris Johnston) Newsgroups: comp.lang.modula2 Subject: Re: Time to choose folks Message-ID: <1990Jun15.202849.3053@eagle.lerc.nasa.gov> Date: 15 Jun 90 20:28:49 GMT References: Sender: news@eagle.lerc.nasa.gov Reply-To: chris@sarah.lerc.nasa.gov (Chris Johnston) Organization: NASA Lewis Research Center, Cleveland, OH Lines: 36 We have been using Logitech's compiler for a few years now. I looked at the JPI compiler and was quite impressed with it, at first. The things that made us stay with Logitech: Logitech used library modules that were quite similar to the ones in Wirth's book. The JPI compiler "improved" the modules, using different names for modules and procedures in modules. Some of the otherwise identical procedures had the order of the arguements changed. JPI supplied their CORE library, which defined modules with the same names (and with the same procedures) as Logitech's. They didn't include FileSystem. Converting our Logitech code would have been a major pain. I wrote some assembly modules. These would have had to be changed to match up with the segment and module names used by Logitech. There isn't anything wrong with the way that JPI did these things, it just wasn't worthwhile redoing the existing code to fit the new system. We found an odd implementation error in JPI's VAL statement. VAL should always give you either a good conversion or a runtime error. JPI's would happily convert a negative integer into a large cardinal without warning. It also seemed to give you some 16 bit chunk out of a real when you did a VAL from real to cardinal. They may have fixed all of these things by now. Unfortunately, we have written even more Logitech code, making the conversion even harder... We don't mind the speed of the Logitech compiler system. The compiled code is acceptably quick for our applications. I like the point editor a *** LOT *** better than the wordstar clone in JPI. The people at JPI are very nice and the compiler isn't bad, but we'll be sticking to Logitech until something comes along that is so much better that it is worthwhile changing. Stony Brook looks good so far and our programs seem to port easier. We're still looking. Chris