On Tuesday, 96/04/09, Andrew Grillet wrote to David Noon about
"Virtual Pascal for OS" as follows:

AG>  DN> Did you ever acquire a copy of the ALGOL 68 compiler that was being
AG>  DN> discussed in this echo about 10 months ago? If so, is it any good?
AG> 
AG> No... I spent ages trying to, but I never got to speek to a 
AG> human on the quoted
AG> phone number, and never got called back. I got the impression it
AG> was a hoax.

Hi Andrew,

Last year, I contacted Oxford & Cambridge Compilers Ltd (OCCL) on the
Internet and received a white paper on ALGOL 68 written by the compiler
authors. They are based in Cambridge, so I presume they are academics.
They probably don't know how to work a telephone.

The Internet e-mail said that their TRANSPUT was "a little crude at
present" which I took to mean one should use the raw API. Also, there
didn't seem to be any thunking ability, so the 16-bit API was out of
bounds. There was no IDE at the time either.

Worse still, the price was 240 quid plus VAT. This is almost twice the
street price of Watcom C/C++, with not so much as an editor bundled in.

Like you said, it's a shame.

Regards

Dave


 * KWQ/2 1.2i * "More hay, Trigger?"  "No thanks, Roy, I'm
stuffed!"

--- Maximus/2 3.01