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From: gibson@unc.UUCP (Bill Gibson)
Newsgroups: net.micro,net.micro.cbm
Subject: Re: Promal
Message-ID: <666@unc.unc.UUCP>
Date: Mon, 2-Dec-85 15:07:36 EST
Article-I.D.: unc.666
Posted: Mon Dec  2 15:07:36 1985
Date-Received: Thu, 5-Dec-85 05:21:14 EST
References: <2052@aecom.UUCP> <210@bnrmtv.UUCP>
Reply-To: gibson@unc.UUCP (Bill Gibson)
Distribution: net
Organization: CS Dept, U. of N. Carolina, Chapel Hill
Lines: 40
Xref: watmath net.micro:12931 net.micro.cbm:1857
Summary: 

> >        Has anyone ever used Promal?  
>
>As I remember it, Promal is public domain software. It is worth having but
>I would make sure if you can access legally for free.

Whoa, there. If this is the same Promal I'm thinking about, it's a
Commercial Product (a product for which payment is required). 
The Promal I'm thinking of is put out by a company in Raleigh, N.C.
and is a high-level language which slightly resembles C.

I was looking into getting Promal about a year ago, and I got the company
to send me their advertising literature. From what I recall, the language
uses indentation to show how code is nested (instead of using begin-end
or {} ). This forces the code to be written in a strict format, but I 
consider that format to be an easy one to read, so this feature isn't
a problem to me.

The thing that I didn't like about the language was that the basic
package you get (~$50) includes an "executive" (similar to a shell, I guess)
and a compiler which compiles *only to pseudocode*! The executive then
interprets the pseudocode of any program which is "run". If you want to
compile to native 6502 (i.e. 6510) code, you buy a "stand-alone" version 
of the package, which allows you to compile programs into load-and-execute
code. Come to think of it, the "stand-alone" package might simple link in
a copy of the executive for your program to access, instead of compiling
down from pseudocode.

My problems with pseudocode compiling are 1) I want to know *exactly* what
code is executing because 2) I want to program real-time applications which
I might have to tweak based on the numbers of instructions in a given time-
critical section. Even if Promal's pseudocode interpreter is fast, I might
run into time problems. I haven't used the language, though; are there any
Promal users out there who can be specific about speed?

If I were programming non-time-critical code that I didn't plan to sell,
I might use Promal anyway, since it looks like a useful language. On the
other hand, I might rather get one of the C compilers.

Bill Gibson
gibson@unc                   ...[akgua,decvax,philabs]!mcnc!unc!gibson