crunch@well.UUCP (John Draper) (08/30/85)
I have a report on the latest release of the Megamax C compiler. While I was at the Boston show, I took 3 hours and spent my time going over the new ver 2.1. Erik was very helpful in explaining all the differences in the Compiler, Editor, Batch and linker. There are a few problems that need to be worked out. They are: -- Linker seems to crash when there are a lot of files on the same vol as the linker. If you don't have a hard disk, this is no problem. -- The new editor supplied with the update has a lot of new features. Some very useful. However, the new editor's search function is very slow. Also, you can no longer highlight a section of text, pull down the search menu and have the selection range placed on the search window. It does have one very nice feature that allows the selection to "switch case states" or in other words, to switch a selection from lower case to upper case. Its "go to line number" feature is also useful when the compiler gags and you want to find which line caused the problem. -- One last bug in the Compiler was detected, so MegaMax wasn't able to update their system until the last 2 days of the show. I got mine updated and it seems to work OK now, although I haven't tried everything yet. The header files were changed slightly in the qdvars.h file which made my program gag the compiler. It was the qdvars.screenbits being changed to just "screenbits". Also "printf" was changed to do I/O buffering, so "fflush(stdout)" is necessary to ensure display to screen after your last "printf". Other than that, and the October release of the debugger, I think the Megamax system has come a long way towards being the best compiler for the $$$. -- The Batch program has it's own built in C type language that controls execution of the compilation process. It "time stamps" the .c and .o files when modified, thus compiles and links only what it needs to create the application. It takes a while to debug and create your "Batch Program", but once created, it works fine. Volume names and file names are CASE SENSITIVE so WATCH IT!!, this little "gotcha!!" caused an extra hour of debugging time. Erik promised to fix that little glitch as well. It took Erik about 1 1/2 hours to write and debug the Batch program which used four modules. Erik works at MegaMax, so I wonder how many days or weeks it whould have taken me (or anyone else) to get it working. One last note, I made sure that Jeff and Erik wrote down the bugs in the linker, and got re-assurance that they will look into it immediately upon returning to Richardson Texas. Also, I got Erik to agree with me that file names and volume names should be case in-sensitive to be consistant with the Mac Toolbox interface. If anyone has any other questions, just reply to me here on the WELL. I hope to be back to programming as soon as I can. Perhaps as early as next week. One other thing, I want to thank everyone who responded to my plea for a Matrix package.