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From: csuwr@warwick.ac.uk (Derek Hunter)
Newsgroups: eunet.micro.acorn,comp.sys.acorn
Subject: Re: More about BASIC vs. Pascal vs. C (the flame war continues !)
Message-ID: <1991Feb12.233654.5140@warwick.ac.uk>
Date: 12 Feb 91 23:36:54 GMT
References: <1991Feb9.075251.16439@rtf.bt.co.uk> <1991Feb10.180855.17062@cns.umist.ac.uk> <1991Feb11.105227.15182@and.cs.liv.ac.uk>
Sender: news@warwick.ac.uk (Network news)
Organization: Computing Services, Warwick University, UK
Lines: 40

My penn'orth is this:

Currently, I only have BASIC on the Arc, so I am rather limited in what I can
 use (Until my C compiler is finished. I don't waste money on commercial
 things... :-).

I have written a records system for BASIC (I, II, III, IV & V, takes ~1K
 I seem to remember) /in/ BASIC, so I'm essentially writing my compiler in a
 very messy Pascal type thing. (I may post the records library if people
 want it. Uncoded since it's only ~1K and I don't intend to line
 Pilling's pocket)

On UNIX, I write short, very quick, messy and one-shot things in Pascal since
 BASIC isn't on it, and it would only be Microsoft anyway. For big things,
 I much prefer C. (t's why I want a version for the Arc - A handy 3rd year
 project).

Since I have to adapt in my programming from tape Beebs up to UNIX, I have
 no really strong feelings because I don't usually have a choice, but if I
 were forced to make a decision, I would say BASIC V comes joint with Pascal
 (Better if they had inbuilt records, and decent file and string handling
 respectively), and first ANSI C with a darn intelligent linker, and stdio,
 math, strings,and malloc built into the compiler as extensions producing
 inline coding.

I do feel that massive 'Hello world' binaries is silly, but then you'll
 only /ever/ really write /one/ of those, won't you? Anyway any halfway
 decent compiler should spot the disuse of int main(argc, argv, env)
 sort of 'extras', and not 'include' them.

One question, does the Arc's C compiler have a math.h, and does this make it
 jump to subroutines, or are the FP codes assembled like any other things?

	- Derek . . . The man with no .sig     (I've seen the problems...)

	- Derek . . . The man with no .sig     (I've seen the problems...)

	- Derek . . . The man with no .sig     (I've seen the problems...)

[snigger]