CompuServe Messages

Well, first of all, DICE has never been PD. The shareware versions are FD, Freely Distributable and, I think I mentioned it here, Matt is only going to release one more shareware update. After that, new versions will only be registered, or, assuming Matt finds a publisher/distributor, commercial. And Matt has said that when the commercial version appears, registered user will receive a discount equal to their registration fee. After buying my system I didn't have the extra $200 to buy Manx or Lattice, so I bought the Developer's Kit & downloaded PDC & SozoC. A few weeks of trying to work in that environment remined me that TANSTAAFL. Sozo was faster and produced smaller executables but choked on a lot of things. PDC was a bit more robust but slow and it produced huge executables. In both cases the really infuriating problem was the documentation. The LACK of it, I should say. I found it impossible to debug a program: was it my code or was the compiler misunderstanding my code? Why didn't the error messages tell me what the problem was? Oh, I see, PDC doesn't do structure assignments. Oh, I see, I have to cast that pointer to pass it to a function. Arggh! Ect. Etc. Etc. The week I started pricing Lattice was the week that Matt released DICE. So I gave it a try based on Matt's reputation. Gee, look at that, an error message that's understandable. Look, a WARNING, that's right, I didn't prototye that function properly. Gosh, this thing runs fast. Hmm, that executable IS tiny! Did I do something wrong? No, it works. Golly, I didn't spend three days tracking down a bug in the compiler! Why, look, source to the libraries! 🙂 OK, the shareware version of DICE is skimpy on documentation, but the registered version is not. Online docs available through DME's autorefs. The registered version also has a lot of features missing from the shareware version. Matt fixes bugs pretty darn fast, He's already fixed a few arcane ones that I sent him in a day or two. I'm not an official beta tester, but I do send him [ MORE ]