Letters To The Editor

Hisoft Pascal – 1

Readers may recall that in the Jan-Mar ’82 issue of 80-Bus News a letter from Mr Holy (in fact written seven months earlier) raised three points concerning Hisoft to which I would reply as follows:–

1. We now always publish our address and telephone number, although I agree we have not yet been listed in the telephone directory. With a new business which was likely to change premises I did not wish to inconvenience customers by a change of phone number in the directory.
2. There is no discrepancy between the workspace addresses given in the documentation and those actually used by the Pascal compiler. Unfortunately Mr. Holy had been sent the list of addresses for use under NASMON not Nas-Sys. This was easily rectified.
3. Owing to my absence abroad I was not able to reply to Mr Holy’s letter as promptly as possible.

Unfortunately Mr Holy’s letter was published some seven months after it had been written but I guess it is just one of those that slipped through the net and was published long after it had been dealt with satisfactorily.

Further information about Hisoft Pascal can be obtained from the advert which appears elsewhere in this issue.

D.G. Link of Hisoft.

Hisoft Pascal – 2

I am referring to my letter published in 80-Bus News vol. 1, issue 1, regarding the Hisoft Pascal compiler.

It appears that a rather unfortunate error has been made by your magazine, in that the above letter was published nine months after it was written. This has put the letter almost completely out of context, particularly as in the meantime Hisoft had contacted us and had been very helpful indeed.

I can now state that, as far as we have been able to determine, the Naspas-3 compiler contains no ‘bugs’ at all. We are very pleased with it and with the assistance which we have recently received from Hisoft.

With hindsight, it would appear that our difficulties were due to –

1) a page or two missing from the original documentation and
2) the apparent inability of some sections of the run-time code to operate when interrupts were present. The latter point is relatively unimportant as far as Nascom users are concerned since most Nascoms do not use interrupts.

P. Holy of Ringdale Engineering Co. Ltd

Hisopt Pascal – 3

Users of HISOFT NASPAS 3 (with the trigonometric extensions) will probably be aware of a few minor bugs in the compiler. With the permission of the authors of this compiler, I publish here details of how to fix these bugs. This fix applies to copies of the compiler purchased after 1st May 1981. One of these fixes may not be necessary for the later compilers, but I include it for completeness.

I deal with four distinct bugs. These are:

1) COS(0) = −1 instead of 1
2) Faulty handling of explicit string parameters e.g. PROC1('Pascal');.