Relay-Version: version B 2.10 5/3/83; site utzoo.UUCP
Posting-Version: version B 2.10 UW 5/3/83; site uw-beaver
Path: utzoo!watmath!clyde!burl!ulysses!mhuxj!houxm!vax135!cornell!uw-beaver!info-mac
From: info-mac@uw-beaver (info-mac)
Newsgroups: fa.info-mac
Subject: Some Macpascal observations
Message-ID: <2134@uw-beaver>
Date: Wed, 7-Nov-84 03:30:36 EST
Article-I.D.: uw-beave.2134
Posted: Wed Nov  7 03:30:36 1984
Date-Received: Fri, 9-Nov-84 05:55:11 EST
Sender: yenbut@uw-beave
Organization: U of Washington Computer Science
Lines: 39

From: Dick Kalagher <kalagher@mitre>
The following are some random comments about Macpascal after using it
intensivly for the past two weeks. The application was a preprocessor
for psudo-FORTRAN that would convert WHILE and REPEAT loops to standard
FORTRAN. 

1. Since this involved FORTRAN source code, where spaces at the beginning
of the line are important, the proportional spacing was the main problem.
The text editor and the file printer that are on the Pascal disk need to
be modified if you want monospacing.  I took the easy way and
used Macwrite with Monoco font.

2. If you use the Pascal text editor, Macwrite will no longer accept
the file.

3. On two occassions, I tried to print a listing using "standard".
I got the "Printing message" but no printout.  Draft printing
worked OK. I don't know if this is a problem with Pascal, the
imagewriter or what--need to investigate further.

4. Pascal does graphics very fast (probably due to quickdraw, not
Pascal) but the text processing was very slow.  Over a minute to
read, process and write a 35 line FORTRAN program.

5. Sometimes a correct line in the program will show up as
incorrect(outlined).  This occurs when you are correcting a previous
syntax error.  You need to scroll the text off the screen and
back again to get it to appear correct. This could throw new students.

6. This program used up 53% of the available memory.  Editing at times
was very sluggish as the program got larger.

7. .
w
7. If you run the program, the window you are writing to does not
automatically become active. Even MS Basic got that right.

8. Overall I am very pleased-- these are relativly minor problems. Now
when will we see the compiler...