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From: info-mac@uw-beaver
Newsgroups: fa.info-mac
Subject: Re: UCSD p-System for the Macintosh
Message-ID: <281@uw-beaver>
Date: Fri, 21-Dec-84 20:01:08 EST
Article-I.D.: uw-beave.281
Posted: Fri Dec 21 20:01:08 1984
Date-Received: Sun, 23-Dec-84 00:32:59 EST
Sender: daemon@uw-beaver
Organization: U of Washington Computer Science
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From: cornell!vax135!ariel!hou4b!hou5f!hou5e!ihw@uw-beaver.arpa

I bought the UCSD Pascal p-system with my Mac recently. I have not used it very much 
but I am rather disappointed with it.  It is NOT a Mac product; it is merely a
68000 port of their other PC-based p-systems-
	 all their utilities are keyboard
based and make absolutely no use of the mouse; they have to compensate even for
cursor keys by substituting weird key combinations.
	the documentation that comes with it is generic;  a small supplement
describes how to use it on a Mac, but this is mostly how to make it work on a
Mac - not special Mac features.
	very little support for Mac features (menus, windows, graphics) - a 
small library with a few drawing routines, I think.  
	all files reside in a 'p-volume' which is itself a Mac file, so you 
cannot access files outside of the p-system environment.
	it produces p-code that will run only in the p-system environment.

Leaving behind the aforementioned issues, the p-system is probably as good as
the ones developed for other systems, which I understand, is very good.

SofTech does also have a Macintosh development environment for Pascal- mouse
editor, full access to quickdraw routines, etc.  This seems to have come out
much later than their original p-system.  (I should have waited for this.)
My understanding is that it produces stand-alone code (not p-code) that does
not need a support environment to run.

I am still interested in my p-system for the Mac and would like to run software
developed for other p-systems (that is supposed to be the beauty of p-code).
Also, I want to develop a p-system library to gain full access to th Quickdraw
routines.

If you do go with the p-system, keep in touch; perhaps we can help each other
out.

Happy Macking,
				Irwin Walkenfeld
				AT&T Information Systems Laboratories
				Holmdel, NJ
				....!hou5e!ihw