WOODRUFF%UCF1VM.BITNET@wiscvm.arpa (Mark G. Woodruff) (01/05/86)
I paid almost $400 for EcoSoft C for a Kaypro II with SLR's Z80ASM assembler and linker early spring of last year. For the price, I was expecting a well-supported full K&R implementation. I was unpleasantly suprised. The compiler is a subset (missing bit fields, #line, and some more) of K&R. It has far more of the UNIX(tm) C libraries that I expected, or needed, but didn't include source code for them. The compiler does not support all the options in the manual, and parses them wrong if grouped together. It is slow, takes up more than a disk with the assembler/linker, and generates poor code. Functions and pre-processor statements are only six characters significant in the *source* code! The 'register' statement is allowed, but is treated as an 'extern', thus making 'register i = 1' invalid. In summary, I thought I was ripped off. After two weeks of use, I gave up, and now it sits gathering dust on my shelf. I use Turbo Pascal for all my programs. I would not suggest you purchase at the price I paid. If you can get it cheaply (I'll gladly sell my copy), and aren't doing any serious programming, you *might* consider buying it. Regards, Mark