🚀 go-pugleaf

Two recent queries were about Modula-2 compilers for the IBM PC
and compatibles. Nicholas Chrissakis asked about native code
generation and presence of a symbolic debugger, and Jim Hayes
asked about >64K address space and ability to create EXE files.

I use the Logitech compiler, which does meet those needs.
It creates native code comparable in effiency to the C and Pascal
compilers for the PC (in some cases comparing very favorably), and
runs with or without an 8087. Debugging can be done with a symbolic
'post mortem dump' debugger, or interactively with a run-time
symbolic debugger as the program executes. Both are very good.

Data areas can be arbitrarily large (I believe that a single ARRAY
or record cannot exceed 64K bytes), so the entire PC address space
can be used. The compiler and linker normally produce a LOD file
that is run under a small executor module, but a utility program
is provided that creates a true EXE file from the LOD file.

I am unclear which of these things is part of the 'base' compiler
package, and which are add-ons, since I have all of them.
The overall system is more than adequate for producing real programs.
It is professional and reliable.

I have used the Modula Research Corporation M-code interpreter and found
it to be too slow for humans to use. Their recently announced native
code compiler presumably fixes this, but I haven't tried it.
I played briefly with the ITC compiler, but could not stand the awful
syntax editor one must use (short of explicitly importing and exporting
files created externally). The initial version especially was quite buggy,
and was known to destroy disk directories. I looked briefly at Release 2,
but not enough to see if the fatal errors still occurred.

I have no business relationships with the above vendors; the opinions
expressed above are my own...

Jeff Savit  (JEFFS@MAINE, or jsavit on BIX)