Anyone use Megamax or Lazer C?

[Anthony Lapadula]

In article <710 at leah.Albany.Edu>, jac423 at leah.Albany.Edu (Julius A Cisek) writes:
> 
> Does anyone here use the Megamax C or Lazer C development package for
> the Atari ST? I have just received Megamax and am quite pleased with it,
> although the manual leaves quite a few things vague. I will be
> developing software during the summer and will probably need some help.
> For starters, what do they mean by a workstation?
> 
> 							J.A.Cisek
> 							jac423 at leah.albany.edu


Generally, Laser C is an order of magnitude better than 'plain vanilla'
Megamax C, especially if you don't have a hard disk (I don't have one,
probably never will).  The shell and editor are now integrated, and
automatically use all avaliable RAM as a cache.  File accesses go *much*
faster now.

They rewrote the editor to handle files >32K, and the scrolling is FAST.

The manual is ~600 pages long, well organized, and much more lucid than
the original "manual" (and I use that term loosely).  In fact, it's
generally much better than the books put out by Abacus that run 
~$18 per.  (But then again, from what I hear, what _isn't_ better?)

A respectable 'make' utility makes (re-)compilation trivial, and the
UNIX exec() is now supported.

You now get examples for the AES, VDI, BIOS, etc., all of which are
extremely helpful.  In 2 hours I constructed a simple menu-driven
windowing application, mostly because the examples were structured
as an expandable skeleton to build programs on top of.

An no longer will your buggy programs cause a system crash -- the shell
catches virtually all exceptions and puts up a dialog: "Error ##
occurred.  [Shell] [Reboot] or [Dump]?"

And there's a simple symbolic debugger that you can use to squash
bugs.  Breakpoints and parameter value checking are included, and 
you can expand the debugger to handle your own data types automatically.  

All in all, if the upgrade to Laser C is only $20 (like it was for me),
send in your money NOW!

BTW, I am in no way affiliated with Megamax.  I just love Laser C.

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