TITLE
Beginner's Guide to Amiga E
VERSION
Edition 1.0. Covers the latest (PD) version 2.1b of Amiga E.
AUTHOR
Jason R. Hulance <jason@fsel.com> (or <m88jrh@ecs.ox.ac.uk>).
DESCRIPTION
This Guide is intended to be complementary to the existing Amiga
E documentation, and it is aimed at the beginner, rather than the
more experienced programmer. Amiga E is (currently) an Amiga
specific programmming language, designed and implemented by
Wouter van Oortmerssen. It has become quite popular due to,
amongst other things, its amazingly fast compilation speed and
its similarity to C and Modula-2.
The Guide is divided into three main parts: the first assumes
very little knowledge of programming and progresses through the
second to describe all aspects of the Amiga E language. The
third part is dedicated to some illustrative examples.
Experienced programmers (who are new to Amiga E) may find the
second part useful for learning the language, especially if read
in conjunction with Wouter's documentation.
The topics covered in Part One include procedures, variables and
expressions. Part Two builds on this, describing the type system
(including the list and string types), quoted expressions,
built-in functions, modules, exceptions and recursion.
The Guide may also be used as a quick reference, since it
includes both a language and a concept index. The concept index
is pretty exhaustive. The language index covers all the language
keywords and built-in functions, constants and variables.
There are two forms of the Guide included in the archive: an
AmigaGuide(R), hypertext version and an ANSI text version. (The
latter is the more suitable for printing, using standard Amiga
printer drivers.) Other forms are available (such as a more
AmigaGuide-v34 friendly version) from the author (see below).
SPECIAL REQUIREMENTS
To get the most from this you need the Amiga E package,
obviously. The current version is v2.1b and is Public Domain.
You can find it in, for instance, the dev/e directory on any
Aminet site. If you don't already have a copy, try it: you might
be very surprised.
There is a text version of the Guide in the archive, so you don't
need to use a hypertext viewer, but it is preferable.
HOST NAME
Aminet. For example, ftp.doc.ic.ac.uk (146.169.2.1) in the UK.
DIRECTORY
/pub/aminet/dev/e
FILE NAMES
BeginnersGuide.lzh (200Kbytes)
PRICE
Free. A more AmigaGuide-v34 friendly version is also available,
but separately from the author (to keep the archive size down).
Also, a TeX dvi and a PostScript version are available for a
small cost (five UK pounds). They don't contain anything more,
but are much nicer for printing (the cross references and
indexes, especially).
DISTRIBUTABILITY
The archive is freely distributable so long as it is complete and
unaltered. All versions of the Guide are Copyright (c) 1994,
Jason R. Hulance.
OTHER
Amiga E v3.0 is due out sometime soon. Wouter has been doing a
grand job extending and improving the language. There are a lot
of really exciting new features. This Guide will hopefully be
completely revised to cover the new version. You, the reader,
are strongly encouraged to help me improve it by sending me your
criticisms.
converted with guide2html by Kochtopf