Relay-Version: version B 2.10 5/3/83; site utzoo.UUCP
Posting-Version: version B 2.10.2 9/18/84; site bonnie.UUCP
Path: utzoo!watmath!clyde!bonnie!jww
From: jww@bonnie.UUCP (Joel West)
Newsgroups: net.micro.mac,net.lang.mod2,net.lang.pascal
Subject: SofTech/Volition Modula-2 for Mac?
Message-ID: <473@bonnie.UUCP>
Date: Wed, 24-Apr-85 22:12:00 EST
Article-I.D.: bonnie.473
Posted: Wed Apr 24 22:12:00 1985
Date-Received: Thu, 25-Apr-85 04:30:12 EST
Organization: CACI -- La Jolla, Calif.
Lines: 54
Xref: watmath net.micro.mac:1159 net.lang.mod2:201 net.lang.pascal:286

I would like to pass on two tidbits, quoting from a local newspaper,
on Modula-2 for the Mac and faster Apple Pascal:

"SofTech upgrades p-System software:
    Performance speed on Apple II computers increased"
	San Diego Tribune, April 22 financial pages

(Quoting Benjamin Goodwin, president of SofTech microsystems)
    ...new products on the way, Goodwin said, will be a "new language product"
    and an "integrated software package" in July (both for the IBM PC
    line) and "a Modula II [sic] product" this fall.

    ....Goodwin said SoftTech Micro is negotiating to aquire the rights
    to bankrupt Volition Systems' Advanced System Editor (ASE), as
    well as its implementation of Niklaus Wirth's Modula II computer
    language...

Also, in the article,

    ...[the p-System software]got a reputation from program developers as
    being particularly slow in execution, especially on the Apple, which,
    some said, "ran slow as molasses."  [Goodwin] agrees: "We lost contact
    with the customer and input of what they wanted in a product."
       But that's all changing, he said: "We're speeding up performance
    on the Apple II family by a magnitude of 20 to 30 times."

    ...Numerou "overhead reductions" [Ed: quotes mine] have taken place
    at SofTech Micro, including employee layoffs....the payroll [has]
    been reduced from a peak 141 ... to a current 32 employees.

Other sections note that the p-System promised portability but died
when MS-DOS became a standard; that SofTech has a 15-year contract with
UC Regents in exchange for royalties; and that SofTech discovered that
licensing the p-System to vendors (DG, IBM, DEC..) was not the same
as selling copies.  Also, SofTech "wrote off $1.8 million in bad debts
from Osborne" [computers, not adam].

-----------------personal comment--------------------
The Volition deal would make sense, since Volition is about 10 miles
southwest of SofTech and the two are, to my knowledge, the only two
companies to do Macintosh language development in San Diego.
(There's also Telesoft in town, but that's entirely Ada.)

Second, the UCSD Pascal for the Mac ("MacAdvantage") benchmarked
in my test between 30-100 as slow as a compiled C.  This suggests
that the new UCSD Pascal would be not a p-system at all, but a
fully compiled language.
-- 
	Joel West				     (619) 457-9681
	CACI, Inc. - Federal 3344 N. Torrey Pines Ct La Jolla 92037
	jww@bonnie.UUCP (ihnp4!bonnie!jww)
	westjw@nosc.ARPA

   "The best is the enemy of the good" - A. Mullarney