However, by design it did not support recursion, directly or indirectly:
https://atariwiki.org/wiki/Wiki.jsp?page=Action
Variables were assigned constant locations, which made things easier for the cpu, but that's a harsh limitation.
It was only available on Atari and for a while you had to have a cartridge to run its programs. For many, these were deal-breakers, as you couldn't release your programs to many.
I believe that static assignment is the default for Turbo as well. If you want re-entrant/recursive calls, they were selectively enabled through a directive.
But at least it was directly supported by Turbo.
6502 and stack frames don’t really get along. 65816 was a much better citizen in that regard.
I wrote sound-sampling software for Atari using Action! and Mac/65 by OSS, using my own DAC+ADC hardware (8-bit of course). They were fast tools, it was very productive.
Turbo Pascal also came out in 01983 for 8-bit computers, but "Action!" looks pretty comparable. TP came out in November, though, so maybe "Action!" was earlier.
F83 was also an IDE for 8-bit computers (with multithreading, reflection, macros, a single-stepping debugger, and virtual memory) but despite the name didn't come out until 01984. (It was a model implementation of the Forth-83 standard, thus the misleading name.)
As wduquette pointed out in the previous thread in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45132286, Apple Pascal was an IDE for Apple's 8-bit machines four years earlier. I would add that the UCSD p-System it was based on was available for other 8-bit machines as well, but I don't know what year. But those were bytecode interpreters and so very slow. F83 was intermediate, using indirect-threaded code.
I meant that both Turbo Pascal and "Action!" "had (...) integrated into one package: the monitor, compiler, text editor and debugger" and compiled to native code, not that the languages were syntactically similar, although I agree that there is some syntactic similarity, especially if the points of comparison are BASIC, FORTH, and assembly.
Action! is a cool language.
However, by design it did not support recursion, directly or indirectly: https://atariwiki.org/wiki/Wiki.jsp?page=Action Variables were assigned constant locations, which made things easier for the cpu, but that's a harsh limitation.
It was only available on Atari and for a while you had to have a cartridge to run its programs. For many, these were deal-breakers, as you couldn't release your programs to many.
As always, trade-offs, but pretty big ones.
I believe that static assignment is the default for Turbo as well. If you want re-entrant/recursive calls, they were selectively enabled through a directive.
But at least it was directly supported by Turbo.
6502 and stack frames don’t really get along. 65816 was a much better citizen in that regard.
discussions ( 2 days ago ) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45131243
I wrote sound-sampling software for Atari using Action! and Mac/65 by OSS, using my own DAC+ADC hardware (8-bit of course). They were fast tools, it was very productive.
Turbo Pascal also came out in 01983 for 8-bit computers, but "Action!" looks pretty comparable. TP came out in November, though, so maybe "Action!" was earlier.
F83 was also an IDE for 8-bit computers (with multithreading, reflection, macros, a single-stepping debugger, and virtual memory) but despite the name didn't come out until 01984. (It was a model implementation of the Forth-83 standard, thus the misleading name.)
As wduquette pointed out in the previous thread in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45132286, Apple Pascal was an IDE for Apple's 8-bit machines four years earlier. I would add that the UCSD p-System it was based on was available for other 8-bit machines as well, but I don't know what year. But those were bytecode interpreters and so very slow. F83 was intermediate, using indirect-threaded code.
Both Pascal and Action! descended from Algol so there are some similarities.
I meant that both Turbo Pascal and "Action!" "had (...) integrated into one package: the monitor, compiler, text editor and debugger" and compiled to native code, not that the languages were syntactically similar, although I agree that there is some syntactic similarity, especially if the points of comparison are BASIC, FORTH, and assembly.