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Amos Is Crap







                                by D!ck

Iceman's  article struck a chord in something that I once debated about,
AMOS  Pro.   I  had  a  long - ahem - active discussion with a couple of
people a while ago, here's my arguments for this debate.

AMOS  Pro is shite, it is very badly put together, it is very unfriendly
in  terms  of system features, it is slow and cumbersome and set in it's
ways, not the best by a long shot.

AMOS  Pro *is* a "proper" basic though, none of this low-level access to
functions malarky that Blitz thrives on.  If you programmed Basic on the
C64  then  moving  to  AMOS  is  a  piece  of cake, all those high-level
routines sat there waiting for you.

AMOS Pro is also very easy to use:  a lot of stuff is done for you; file
formats  are  directly  supported by commands; and accessing the system,
while not at a low level or via intuition, is a piece of cake.

AMOS  is  a  great  language for developing in, when you go to Blitz you
have to compile everything before you run it, there's no interpreter for
it,  but with AMOS it's Edit, Run, Edit, Run, all the time, until you've
got it working how you like, then you can compile it.

I wrote The Word in AMOS because it was the language I was proficient in
at  the  time,  in  it I used a lot of technical routines that AMOS just
couldn't (or wouldn't) handle on it's own, and I only got it up to speed
while  looking  like  it does on an A1200 because I cheated like hell to
get everything as close to the system as possible.

If The Word looks good then it's because I put a lot of work into it, as
Iceman  said, it's not the language but the programmer who makes a title
look good.

There  are  loads of Pros and Cons for AMOS, in the end though, it boils
down to being a perfectly capable language, just not a very good one.

Dick