I have just finished reading your "definitive QL review" in this week's issue. I really think you should sack your reviewers and give authors with more balanced opinions the job.
Most of the article was destructively critical and there was only occasional grudging lukewarm praise for the machine.
In the hardware section, Stuart Cooke seems obsessed with the keyboard and the non-standard sockets, and makes a sweeping conclusion that "the QL does not live up to expectations" - an unfair comment after a largely irrelevant preceding section.
The software section contains no new information to speak of; and I presume "atrociously slow screen I/O" really means "slow Microdrive access", an undoubted problem with the word processor but one which, I believe, has been helped by changes to the Operating System in later versions of the QL ROM.
The SuperBasic review section is a mess. The author should know that concatenating strings uses the ampersand (&), not the +, which is used only for numeric data. The paragraph headed Strings merely mentions three unimportant bugs. Of far greater importance is how SuperBasic handles string arrays, which I personally find confusing especially assigning to sliced string. There is no mention of the interesting 'coercion' concept, which makes the VAL and STR$ functions unnecessary.
I own a first issue QL and of course it contains many bugs; but the fascinating Basic, the powerful MC68008 with its clear instruction set, and the free software plus a versatile and expandable computer that has a great future - make it amazing value, and it should not have received such a one-sided and thoughtless review, particularly from a respected magazine such as PCN.
8th September 1984
