From: aeg03@rrz.uni-koeln.de (Jan T. Kim)
Subject: GFA news (was: Which programming language?)
Reply-To: kim@vax.mpiz-koeln.mpg.dbp.de
Organization: Regional Computing Center, University of Cologne, F. R. Germany
Date: Sun, 11 Oct 92 23:54:57 GMT

In <718783211.F00001@monly.wlink.nl.wlink.nl> Peter.Kocourek@p13.f112.n100.z60.wlink.nl (Peter Kocourek) writes:

>In a message of <08 Oct 92  11:39:17>, Jan T. Kim  writes:

> JT> I don't agree. GFA basic offers full access to GEM too,  plus  it
> JT> offers  some  powerful  and  convenient commands and functions to
> JT> handle GEM without having to worry about low level stuff (e.g. to
> JT> create  a  menu  you  just  put the menu titles and items into an
> JT> array of strings and then you do a MENU x$()).

>Yes, but GFA itself is an unclean application; it does all sorts
>of   horrible   things  the  programmer  has  no  influence  over
>whatsoever. The bug list of GFA is endless. I could email  it  to
>you  (it's  in  German,  but  your .de address suggests you won't
>mind. :-)) At least, if they finally got email  working  on  this
>end.

As a matter of fact, it is perfecty possible to write  clean  GEM
applications  in GFA. The editor is not written in GEM (but works
ok for the most part anyway), and the interpreter does some nasty
tricks,  but  that doesn't have any consequences on your compiled
program. Programs I wrote and compiled with  the  GFA  basic  3.5
system  ran  on  STs,  TTs  and a Falcon at the Atari Messe right
away.
About the horrible number of bugs: I think these are in GFA basic
3.6, which is really flaky indeed. I recently called Richter, the
company that is continuing the development of GFA basic, and they
told  me  the load of bugs was mostly introduced by GFA when they
introduced support of the TT's FPU. Obviously, the 3.6 system was
in  a  kinda  late  beta  version when the GFA folks got tired of
developing it, so they just released it  and  discontinued  their
product.
But the good news is: At Richter,  they  are  working  on  a  new
version,  and  according  to what I was told, it will have really
neat features, such as
  * full MultiTOS/MiNT support
  * GEM editor
  * full support of accessing foreign libaries
  * full transparency of data structures
They decided not to waste their  time  fixing  the  bugs  in  the
current  version,  instead  they're  doing major rewriting of the
whole system. The interpreter is expected to become available  by
the end of this year, and the compiler will be finished later.
They are very interested in input from GFA users at  Richter,  so
if  you  have  any  ideas, suggestions, remarks, bug reports etc,
please send this stuff to Richter. It will help them improve  the
new GFA basic.
After my call to Richter I was left with the impression that they
are  eager, serious and engaged about developing a new version of
GFA basic, and I think there's good reason to hope that GFA basic
will  continue  to be an excellent programming language for Atari
computers.

A good language doesn't die  just  because  a  company  foolishly
decides to discontinue it.

Greetinx, Jan

 +- Jan Kim -- X.400:    S=kim;OU=vax;O=mpiz-koeln;P=mpg;A=dbp;C=de -+
 |             Internet: kim@vax.mpiz-koeln.mpg.dbp.de               |
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