Amiga E Programming Language

I’m still a big Amiga fan. I spent a lot of time on the machine growing up. I am still tied to it in an open source way actually. AROS is an open source operating system based on the Amiga OS and I spend time following it now. It is in heavy development, but showing a lot of promise. I write a blog called The AROS Show to help inform people about AROS.

One of the most popular programming languages on the Amiga was Amiga E created by Wouter van Oortmerssen. I always wanted to learn Amiga E back then, but never took the time. I was just discussing the language today with a friend who is still a big fan of the language. So I had the urge to investigate more about the language tonight. Wouter states on his Amiga E homepage that the language was based on C++, Ada, Lisp, etc. Which is interesting and cool! While reading about other languages that might be close in syntax, I ran across Modula-2.

Amiga E was written in Assembler on the Amiga so it would be very difficult to port. ECX is a replacement compiler and works on more current Amiga type systems like AmigaOS4 and MorphOS. Then I found a new implementation called PortablE written by Chris Handley. It is a rewrite of the Amiga E programming language from scratch and is in beta stage at the moment. Chris mentions some needed improvements he has made to the language. One of the features planned is to be able to target other systems. Right now it currently compiles for AmigaOS 3 on a 68k processor, using CreativE. It runs quickly on an emulated Amiga (like WinUAE). I wish Chris luck with this. I hope he continues to improve it. It is definitely interesting to me and I plan to follow the progress of PortablE.