info-mac@uw-beaver (info-mac) (09/26/84)
From: winkler@harvard.ARPA (Dan Winkler) I made Manx well aware of my opinion that the Sumacc standards are superior. Their compiler actually has even more incompatibilities with Sumacc than I mentioned in the previous info-mac message. For example, it only notices the first 8 characters of identifiers. Worse, it does not allow passing or returning structures. But some QuickDraw routines, for example, take points, which are structures. In that case, you have to pass *(long *) &myStruct, that is, the long you get by dereferencing the pointer you get by taking the address of the structure. My impression is that Manx is interested in correcting these problems eventually, but for now they want to get a first release done by building on parts of compilers they already have for other machines. They did at least change their header files to be more compatible with the sumacc header files which I sent them, and they are planning to thoroughly document the steps necessary to convert Sumacc code to their compiler.