After readings of Mr. Uuill's interest in Pascal for the Commodore 64 (Issue 63), I feel I should write. I have both the Pascals that he talks about and they have various advantages and disadvantages which I feel I should point out.

Zoom Pascal from Adamsoft is a bit messy to use and difficult to get to grips with because of its various compiler commands which tend to be letters and symbols instead of meaningful words. It does away with line numbers (Pascal has no need for them anyway) and compiles and runs fairly quickly.

You will find that you will be constantly glancing down at your instruction booklet, which is fairly comprehensive.

Oxford Pascal is a different kettle of fish. You enter the source program as in Basic with the full screen editor that the 64 provides. This method is by far the easiest method and if you're used to Basic it can be done with great speed. When it comes to compiling you can have the source program listed on screen or printer or neither while the various error messages are generated.

Compilation is very slow either way and the compiled program is extremely slow.

A simple FOR/NEXT loop in Basic which does nothing 3200 times runs only about 15 seconds slower than an equivalent compiled Pascal program.

Comparing Oxford Pascal and Zoom Pascal, the latter runs a good deal faster: so much so that I wonder if the Oxford Pascal is compiled at all!

Benchtests provded the point. I compared three Pascals, two for the 64 (the ones mentioned) and one for the Spectrum (Hisoft Pascal 4). Hisoft Pascal was, on most tests, about 20 times as fast as Oxford Pascal and about ten times as fast as Zoom.

Oxford Pascal's times were embarassingly slow, Zoom's were above average and Hisoft's for the Spectrum were remarkably fast considering that the machine runs more slowly than the 64.

My advice to My Yuill is that if he wants to learn Pascal, get Oxford Pascal, and if he wants to use the benefits that Pascal offers, get Zoom Pascal.

Nigel Shore, Billingshurst, West Sussex