Mountain View, California-based Jensen and Partners International Inc was formed around a nucleus of Niels Jensen and his programming team from the Sidekick company Borland International Inc. Formed in 1987, the company set to work on a series of optimised programming languages (Jensen had worked on Turbo Pascal at Borland as well as Sidekick), and the Microbytes newswire reports that the now available JPI Modula-2 compiler known as TopSpeed Modula-2 in the US – will be followed by the release of a Turbo-C compiler next year. But a longer term project is to do a high-speed Ada compiler. Everyone says it can’t be done, Jensen told Microbytes We believe it can. The main problem is the size of Ada, which is based on the French language originally called Green, but underwent umpteen committee sessions at the US Department of Defense, and any compiler purporting to be Ada must be verified by the Pentagon to work for the whole language. You have to have a high-speed compiler producing code that runs fast. It’s extremely difficult, but that’s our aim, Jensen said. The Ada compiler will use the same code-generating back end – machine-specific intermediate language down to which the code is compiled as the Modula-2 and C compilers. No release date was specified for the Ada work. Meanwhile TopSpeed Modula-2 is available for under $100, and includes a configurable window-based interface, and also includes source code for the libraries. In September, with support for dynamic overlays (and still more source code), the company will release VID, a window-based debugger, for around $60.
