★ APPLICATIONS ★ PROGRAMMATION ★ OXFORD PASCAL (c) Systems Software (Oxford) Ltd ★ |
| Oxford Pascal (Amstrad Action) | Applications Programmation |
This is the cheapest of the packages covered here and also the most beginner-orientated; two facts that may not be unrelated. It comes in two different forms, a standard disk-resident compiler PAS.COM and a memory-resident compiler/editor/trace utility PASCAL.COM. The first of these works in pretty much the usual way - you type in PAS PROGRAM and it compiles the file PROGRAM.PAS into the P-code file PROGRAM.OBJ. You can run this as is with the interpreter RUN.COM, or turn it into a standalone program with LOCATE.COM. So much for PAS.COM. at least for the moment. PASCAL.COM is rather more unusual. It's a major point in favour of most BASIC systems that the editor and interpreter are memory-resident - that is, you load them into memory at the start of a session and they're both on call there until you've finished programming. (I'm talking here about CP/M BASICs like Mallard and MB ASIC - Locomotive BASIC doesn't even need to be loaded in.) If you write a BASIC program you can run it, find an error, edit it till it's correct and run it again, all within BASIC.COM. More seriously, the PASCAL.COM editor is very unfriendly and quite poorly thought out. To edit a line you need to refer to it by number. But unlike BASIC, lines in PASCAL programs aren't given numbers by the programmer: they're automatically numbered as lines 1,2,3 and so on. When you list your source code by the clumsy 'l,$p' command the line numbers aren't shown. You just have to count down till you reach the line you're interested in. This unfriendliness is a real shame. The editor has some quite powerful features, but it's such a hard slog getting to them I'd sooner use WordStar and forget about the memory-resident system altogether. It works like this: you're given a 40x26 grid with numbers up the side and letters along the bottom. In each cell of the grid is a coloured dot. Every time you run the compiler, it asks you for the colours of the dots in each of four cells of the grid. Get one wrong and it unceremoniously dumps you back into the operating system. This really puts me right off using the package in a serious way I mean, it's just too much effort to go through all that every time you want to compile something. And some enterprising hacker is bound to work out a poke to get round it...
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