Path: utzoo!utgpu!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!cs.utexas.edu!wuarchive!sdd.hp.com!elroy.jpl.nasa.gov!ncar!hsdndev!cmcl2!adm!smoke!gwyn From: gwyn@smoke.brl.mil (Doug Gwyn) Newsgroups: comp.sys.apple2 Subject: Re: Any Pascal programmers for Apple II GS? Message-ID: <16116@smoke.brl.mil> Date: 11 May 91 01:32:59 GMT References: <5184@cernvax.cern.ch> <52593@apple.Apple.COM> Organization: U.S. Army Ballistic Research Laboratory, APG, MD. Lines: 30 In article nagendra@bucsf.bu.edu (nagendra mishr) writes: >Although, I'm 10 times better in C then in PASCAL, I use pascal >because (beleive it or not) I've had better expereinces with TML II >then ORCA/C. I never could manage to compile anything with ORCA/C. >Plus, I'm not sure of this.... so anyone correct me if I'm wrong, I >think that since PASCAL optimization techniques are more STANDARD, any >pascal compiler for the GS will do a better job then any C compiler >just because PASCAL optimization has been around longer and thus more >likely to be incorporated. >So if C compilers on the GS were to imrove, I'm sure that anyone >serious about programming on it would switch. But in our life-time, I >think using a GS means using PASCAL. There is no such thing as "PASCAL optimization", and that whole argument is bogus. Any decent compiler implementation for either language is likely to perform similar optimizations. ORCA/C release 1.0 was, in my opinion, too buggy to be useful. Release 1.1 was better (free upgrade!) but I still couldn't get it to properly translate a lot of code that should have worked. Release 1.2 has fixed most of the really bad bugs in ORCA/C, although there are still several bugs (all the ones I know of have been reported back to ByteWorks and ought to be fixed in the next release, which may not occur for a while). I've found that I can get most of my applications to compile correctly under ORCA/C, although I often have to work around the remaining bugs. If you have a properly suspicious attitude and a clear grasp of what a C compiler is and is not supposed to do, you should be able to use ORCA/C for large programming projects. I would suggest implementation in relatively small pieces, with testing of each piece that is thorough enough to uncover problems caused by compiler bugs.