Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!clyde.concordia.ca!uunet!aplcen!samsung!brutus.cs.uiuc.edu!psuvax1!rutgers!att!cbnewsd!njd
From: njd@cbnewsd.ATT.COM (nick.j.dimasi)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.atari.8bit
Subject: Re: atari.8bit
Message-ID: <13017@cbnewsd.ATT.COM>
Date: 1 Feb 90 23:52:37 GMT
References: <1205@ecompin.UUCP>
Reply-To: njd@cbnewsd.ATT.COM (nick.j.dimasi,ix,)
Organization: AT&T Bell Laboratories
Lines: 30

The poster of the article-to-which-this-is-a-followup asked if ACTION! is
still around.

The answer is:  You bet it is!  I have had ACTION! for oh, around 5 years now,
and although I don't have a LOT of time to program with it, I have a goodly
amount of C programming experience ('been a UNIX/C guy since '79/'80, depending
on whether you count school) and:  I THINK that ACTION! is the BEST 8-bit
language you can get!  It may not be "portable" to other 8-bit machines, but
if one is a REAL DIEHARD Atari (8-bit) user, who cares if it will run on them
other pieces of garbage? :-)  Aside from BASIC and assembler (machine lang.),
more programs are written in ACTION! than other languages - and ACTION! is
structured somewhat like PASCAL (with IF...FI, DO...OD borrowed from ALGOL,
if I recall correctly what little ALGOL I ever knew), but not as strictly
typed (typing is more akin to C, actually types CHAR and BYTE are interchange-
able, for example...), yet not as cryptic as C (i.e. the language doesn't
have so many ways to write one statement, most of them unreadable :-).

Get your hands on an ICD catalog for their price (maybe $79.95, I have it
at home) and check with your dealer - you can usu. get ICD carts. for much
less from a dealer.  (I got SDX for $60, lists in ICD for $79.95, or at least
it did, MEMORY FAULT***** :-)

Have fun!

Nick DiMasi				Uniq Digital Technologies, Inc.
...clout!udt386!nick (not currently read often) (Internet reg. pending)
...att!odutsa!njd (READ WEEKDAYS)
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