Dice V3.1
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Price £99.00

Reviewed by Madness

Tested on A1200/030 50mhz 2chip 4fast 540HD

Dillions  Integrated  C  Environment  (DICE) has been knocking around the
PD/Shareware  market for a long time know, and many a PD and professional
author  have used it to program for the Amiga.  So with SAS being dropped
and  not  much sign of any other C implementation on the Amiga maybe Dice
will get the awards it rightly deserves.

Dice  follows  the ANSI C standard and a limited amount of C++ so if your
doing  C  at  Uni then this compiler is perfect.  I know I'm using it for
exactly  that!  Programming for a Unix based operating system also for my
Uni  project  a  MS-Dos  encryption  utility.   So  all in all its pretty
compatible (note the source code has to be compiled on the MS-DOS machine
to work)

First  of  please not you NEED a hard drive to use Dice though there is a
floppy  only version available.  Also note the hard drive installer works
fine  as long as you know what you are doing, I.e.  take the time to read
the docs and the prompts on screen before installing.

Dice comes with the Commodore/Amiga includes for 1.3/2.x/3.0 and a number
of examples and text editors.

So whats the difference from this version of Dice and the PD version.  On
first  glance  not  a lot, but after playing around and knocking up a few
programs  there  has been a lot of hard work been put into this revision.
The most obvious is the GUI called VMake.  Its incredibly easy to use but
that  still  doesn't  give  the excuse not to include any instructions to
VMake  in  the Manual!  Saying that VMake is easy to use and what it does
is  control  the  projects and the compiler options via a point and click
interface.   My  very  first  time of using C on any computer and I found
Dice to be extremely easy to get on with.  If you have used the Borland C
compilers then your in for a treat as Dice is so much easier.

VMake  is  also  friendly to REXX so you can customise may functions etc.
this makes VMake/Dice very friendly in the way you can do batch update to
you source and real pain if you ever had to do one.

Dice  also  supports  a  number  of  editor  from  the  basic  ed to most
programmers  favourite Cygnus-Ed.  Though I use the DME editor that comes
set for use with Dice and is an OK choice but if you have Cygnus then use
that as Cygnus really shines when used in this sort of environment.

Dice  also  comes  with a limited on-line help but at the time of writing
this review I couldn't seem to get it to work, this was probably my fault
as  I  keep  moving files from one location to the other on me hard drive
:-/  
Saying that the compiler does come with the standard error help eg.
'";" expected  line  11'  and similar.
When an error does occur the editor is started and the source that caused
the  error  is  loaded,  the  cursor is then placed on the line the error
occurred  on.   On the bottom part of the screen the error message(s) are
displayed  with  the  line number(s) the errors on.  This feature is much
better  than  that  on  the  Borland  C  environment  and  makes for easy
debugging of the most common type of errors.

So  if  your  after C for the Amiga you can't really go wrong here a good
and easy to use environment and the most important its still supported!

Beginners note:
Dice  comes  with  a  hefty  manual 300 odd pages but be warned its not a
manual on C but on how to get the best from Dice and the Amiga.  You will
still have to buy or borrow a book on Ansi C.  A good book for new comers
to  C  is  'The  C  programming  language  by  Brain W.Kernighan & Dennis
M.Ritchie' and make sure it is the SECOND EDITION as the first edition is
not  ANSI  C  compatible.   
By  the  way  the above book is writern by the designers of C so its from
the horses mouth so to speak.

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