I originally used COMAL 0.14 on the Commodore 64 and found it an immense inprovement on the built-in BASIC. When the COMAL 2.0 cartridge came out I purchased it as well. Programming in COMAL was so easy and so powerful I could write small programs to accomplish many tasks. It was very satisfying to create something that had a useful purpose rather than just playing games on my computer.
When I got an Amiga 500 I also obtained COMAL for the Amiga. Comal was even more powerful on the Amiga.
Then Commodore collapsed and the COMAL User Group USA disappeared. There seemed to be no one who supported COMAL.
At work I have MS-DOS computers but I couldn't find an MS-DOS version of COMAL in local stores. Therefore I went on to learn C. I found my COMAL experience made learning C very easy. However C is not a language easily used for the small casual programs I used to write in COMAL. The debugging and re-compiling took so much time it was not worth the effort to write the small programs I used to write in COMAL.
So I was delighted when I came across the UniCOMAL web site while surfing the Internet. I hope that with an MS-DOS version of COMAL I can show others the fun of programming and perhaps create some new interest in the COMAL language.
[Editor's note: Mr. McConnell's views on the ease of use of COMAL as compared with 'C' seem to be shared by many COMAL users. See Allan Lane's comments in "the learning curve".]
Uploaded 09 February 2001 / Edited 19 June 2001