Path: utzoo!utgpu!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!cs.utexas.edu!swrinde!zaphod.mps.ohio-state.edu!uakari.primate.wisc.edu!aplcen!haven!adm!smoke!gwyn
From: gwyn@smoke.brl.mil (Doug Gwyn)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.apple2
Subject: Re: User generated software
Message-ID: <14292@smoke.brl.mil>
Date: 1 Nov 90 00:12:15 GMT
References: <9010311420.AA10881@lilac.berkeley.edu>
Organization: U.S. Army Ballistic Research Laboratory, APG, MD.
Lines: 37

In article <9010311420.AA10881@lilac.berkeley.edu> lwv27@CAS.BITNET writes:
>Anyone know of any ports of existing freeware programming languages
>to the Apple II - especially GS/OS and the IIgs?  In particular, I
>would really like to find low cost implementations of software is which
>trivially extentible (even if only like C).

Assuming you desire implementations that run on the IIGS itself, not on
a Macintosh, there are no good, free implementations of any high-level
language other than Forth that I know of, and I keep my eyes open for
such things.

The IIGS and GS/OS pretty much require that executables be produced in
OMF format.  Tools for dealing with this environment are nearly all
based on the Apple IIGS Programmer's Workshop (APW) environment, which
means the ORCA shell with ORCA and Apple DTS developed utilities.  APW
is available via APDA, which is run by Apple in Cupertino, and ORCA is
available from ByteWorks and dealers who stock ByteWorks products.

The two usable C compilers for the IIGS are APW C, which was produced
under contract by Megamax and seems to be largely based on the 4.1BSD
flavor of C, which is pretty much outdated, and ORCA/C, which as of
release 1.1 seems capable of supporting real application development
so long as one is on the lookout for implementation bugs.  ORCA/Pascal
and TML Pascal II are the two widely used implementations of Pascal
for the IIGS; since I haven't used either of them I won't attempt to
describe them.  MDL BASIC seems to be the only viable compiled BASIC
for the IIGS.

For assembly-language programming, the APW and ORCA/M assemblers are
pretty much the same; Merlin 8/16+ is a non-APW development environment
that includes the ability to cross-develop for 8-bit Apple targets.
Manx Software Systems' Aztec C is the only 8-bit Apple II C compiler
and shell environment that I could recommend.

Note that all these are commercial products.  The few freeware ones
that I know of do not really save you anything if you take into account
the consequences of having to cope with their serious deficiencies.