Quote Originally Posted by truly_bent View Post
DavidS;
I like what you're doing and look forward to seeing the results. Sounds like you're taking on the whole ball of wax, so to speak.

I have one question though; why did you choose SPIN for the high level programming language, when C (Propeller C) is also available? Surely more people are comfortable programming in C than the relatively obscure SPIN. As a student of programming languages yourself, C must already be in your repertoire.

Personally, i'll have no problem picking the the syntax, but i thought one of your stated aims was to make this project more accessible. Forcing people to adopt (yet) another programming dialect would seem to be doing the opposite.
Good question. Learning the little quirks of Propeller C (even using Prop GCC) is more difficult for a C programmer than learning SPIN. This is due to the way that code is isolated on the Propeller.

Also the easily availability of SPIN to SPIN bytcode compilers for the Propeller. I do not want to write a tutorial on how to setup one of the various C compilers for the Propeller.

Though I will be including the binaries and instructions for uploading them to the Propeller board, for the non-programmers. The binaries will be from the assembly version, not the SPIN version (Spin is fast enough to do the job, though it is still a byte code interpreted language that only runs at around 0.5 million spin operations per second).

I have thought about a possible future rewrite in C, though the first two versions will be in Propeller Assembly (PASM), and SPIN.

I have also thought about doing a version in PropBASIC, a BASIC like language since many are familiar with BASIC.