Postbag

We welcome your letters for publication in our Postbag page on all matters related to RISC User and the Archimedes.

1ST WORD PLUS

Fellow members may be interested in my first impressions of 1st Word Plus. To start with it is incredibly fast when compared with Arcwriter. This latter was definitely tiresome. By half way down the third page I was having to sit back and wait for each character to appear. The longest document I have so far typed in 1st Word Plus has ten pages, and even at the end it was more than keeping up.

The next point is that every command works, unlike Arcwriter where underline, for example, has always been capricious. One slight moan is the prissy way in which 1st Word Plus insists that every document must be saved before it can be printed, but this is only minor.

I have not yet investigated all the facilities, such as mailmerge, because I have no need for that, but on the whole I can really recommend this program.
L.E.Weaver

Arcwriter may not be the strongest competition for 1st Word Plus, but we welcome Mr Weaver's comments. We hope to give greater coverage in future issues of RISC User to commercially available applications software (see article on Logistix in this issue), and would welcome your comments on choice of word processors, spreadsheets, databases and the like for the Archimedes.

FLOATING POINT ARITHMETIC

While ARM Basic is fast by any standards, there comes a time in mathematical problems where more speed is really needed, and I would normally look to assembler to get over the hard bits. Imagine my consternation to learn that the extremely available built-in assembler in Basic V won't touch real numbers.

I was astonished to see that a Mandelbrot program in another magazine employed a binary procedure to allow the use of assembler. Why not use the Floating Point Emulator (FPE) I thought? The explanation came via a friend in the form of a Mandelbrot program which links the FPE with assembler. A nice piece of work yet it only runs twice as fast as my Basic only version.

It seems that the FPE is an old crock put there to keep the seat warm for a co-processor yet to be decided about. What mathematician would enjoy running his favourite compiled language on an Archimedes at a mere speed gain of 2:1 over Basic? Would it not be possible to dig out the floating point routines which Basic V uses to handle floating point numbers and graft these onto the Basic ARM assembler? Pie in the sky? Well Apple users did it for the 6502, despite total lack of support from Apple itself, and it results in a speed improvement for assembler of five to six times the equivalent Basic program.
Arch Busby

As Mr Busby himself says, the floating point emulator is written to emulate the planned hardware co-processor. This makes the FPE a general purpose maths package conforming to the IEEE standards for floating point representation. The floating point routines in Basic on the other hand are written solely for one purpose. They are written to operate at a lower precision than the FPE, and without all the stringent range checking etc. required of the FPE. Therefore, it is logical that this will prove to be faster than the emulator, although the real hardware co-processor will be many times faster than either. Mr Busby is a little unfair in his speed comparisons. Compiled languages and assembler code are generally several tens of times faster than the Basic equivalent. As for extracting the routines from Basic, this should not prove too hard, and perhaps somebody might like to try it.

MORE UTILITIES

I must qualify as one of the first buyers of the Archimedes (around July/August 1987). I survived a period of no software and inadequate information only because I had my faithful model B. RISC User has, to a large extent, changed that, as it has been very useful in taking owners through a very difficult first year.

My one wish is that you will devote more attention to general purpose utilities for users, rather than programmers. In a recent issue, the Disc Menu and Toolbox (disc editor) are the only stand-alone utilities for the non-programmer. However, if someone asks what I do with the Arc, I don't like to tell them that I use it to edit discs.

You have helped us to understand the machine. Now help us to use it.
O.B.Giwa

All reader comment is useful in determining the content of future issues, and this is one request we have already taken note of in our future planning.