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From: camis..ajb@MITRE.ARPA
Newsgroups: net.micro.atari
Subject: RE:  ACTION! vs. C/65
Message-ID: <8601022040.AA20001@mitre.ARPA>
Date: Thu, 2-Jan-86 15:40:29 EST
Article-I.D.: mitre.8601022040.AA20001
Posted: Thu Jan  2 15:40:29 1986
Date-Received: Fri, 3-Jan-86 04:25:09 EST
Sender: daemon@ucbvax.BERKELEY.EDU
Organization: The MITRE Corp., Washington, D.C.
Lines: 19

I've had my ACTION! cart for about 6 months now. I can't compare it with
C65, having never used it. To my mind, however, ACTION! could be the very
best programming environment on the Atari. The editor is very convenient
to use. The compiler is super fast. Try compiling 300-500 lines of anything
on any machine as fast as ACTION! can (just a very few seconds) on the Atari.
Although I've never examined the machine code emitted by ACTION!, my programs
tend to run blindingly fast. I've written programs in ACTION! for which I would
previously have resorted to assembler.  The documentation supplied is
excellent, and the syntax is easy to learn. The only feature that I can think
of which is present in C and missing in ACTION! is recursion. 

C is a general purpose large language (relatively speaking, no flames please).
ACTION! is a tiny language, well designed for execution in a (specifically)
6502 processor environment. For my money, ACTION! is the best choice to most
completely exploit the Atari environment.

If anyone out there in net-land is interested we could try some benchmarks
comparing ACTION! with any other Atari (or other manufacturer) high or low 
level language.