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Path: utzoo!watmath!clyde!bonnie!akgua!mcnc!ravi
From: ravi@mcnc.UUCP (Ravi Subrahmanyan)
Newsgroups: net.micro.atari
Subject: Re: Action! Programming
Message-ID: <1014@mcnc.mcnc.UUCP>
Date: Sun, 24-Nov-85 21:48:28 EST
Article-I.D.: mcnc.1014
Posted: Sun Nov 24 21:48:28 1985
Date-Received: Tue, 26-Nov-85 20:17:07 EST
References: <633@tekigm.UUCP>
Reply-To: ravi@mcnc.UUCP (Ravi Subrahmanyan)
Distribution: net
Organization: Microelectronics Center of NC; RTP, NC
Lines: 36
Summary: 


>From: aegroup@tekigm.UUCP (Dennis Ward)
>Subject: Re: Action! Programming
>
>By judicious reading of the advertisements in Antic and A.N.A.L.O.G. magazines,
>I was able to partially answer my own questions.  Action! is a cartridge
>available from O.S.S. and presumeably is another distinct computer language.
>However, I am still griped that the original article did not make this clear
>(etc....)
>
>(Flame on)
>What is the advantage of Action! over BASIC, Pascal or C?  Does it fit in one
>of these "families" of languages or is it a new one?  Why we have such a
>proliferation of languages anyway?  I'm still trying to learn AB,MBII and 
>BXE/BXL, familiarizing myself with C, let along trying to learn Pascal and
>Action!
>
>
I guess the key question here is "what Pascal, or C ?".  When Action came
out, the only C widely available was Deep Blue C, which was hardly
complete, and Atari Pascal was a horror requiring 2 drives and lots of
patience.. Action! was like a breath of fresh air, especially because
of the incredible *environment* it provided: a halfway decent editor,
monitor, compiler, all in one 16K cartridge that was only 8K on an XL
machine; not bad at all, in spite of the rather weird bugs that
cropped up now and then.  And above all, *SPEED*, man, (read person if
so inclined), that baby could cruise....  the edit-compile-run cycle is
one of the best I've seen, a comparison with Basic would be like
P-system and Turbo for the (forgiveness, O Holy Ones) PC.  So, 
give a nice, weird product its due, one that gave me infinite joy when my
buddy's PC was beaten by a lowly 1200XL.

 (nostalgia.. guess I'll go brush the dust off 'Cyborg' tonight)

                              -ravi
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