Re: Kyan Pascal - new insights

[hochstrasse@urz.unibas.ch]

In article <22h3j2$n7j@info2.rus.uni-stuttgart.de>, zcaa1122@rpool7.rus.uni-stuttgart.de (Wulf Hofbauer) writes:
> I only have some experience with the 2.0 version. The system as a whole
> is programmed rather strangely, conflicting to most established standards,
> and FULL of bugs. I had to patch the compiler because it assigned CHR(1) to
I thought this bug has been fixed in a subsequent release.

> all CHAR constants - it obviously never has been tested. The runtime
> library also was buggy and quite convoluted. The ProDOS bitmap wasn't
> initialized properly, the compiler produced undocumented error messages
> ("47 error")

Well I didn't have any bug problems with the latest version.

> and does NOT confirm to the ISO standard, though the manuals
> said so.  The code produced by the compiler wasn't optimized in any way

They offered an optimizer package for Kyan which seemed rather good

> and very inefficient. I wasn't able to write any serious program without
> running out of memory. I gave very soon up on Kyan Pascal for these reasons.

The memory limitation is a general problem on 64K Apple IIs programmed in
high level, compiled languages. The use of the 2nd 64K bank helps somewhat,
but to do serious programming in Pascal [I mean applications that really
do something useful] you need at least a IIGS. It's also more fun, because
you can concentrate on your project without worrying about memory...
I think, Kyan offered also a package to use the features of 128K Apple IIs,
i.e. more memory, Double Hires etc.

--Urs

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