paul@greipa.UUCP (Paul A. Vixie) (07/27/85)
Here we go again with more comments and bugs on Desmet C...
This being "buy things for the Mac" month, I am the proud new owner of a
Hyperdrive. While Desmet-C was fast compared to the Modula-2 compiler
using floppies, it SCREAMS with the hard disc. It officially compiles
faster than either the Pyramid (4.2BSD) or VAX 750 (VMS 3.7).
The Shell:
- does not print the line being executed when you use history
substitution, which gets me to wondering sometimes just which
file I'm compiling.
- doesn't seem to have a way of escaping newlines in scripts.
There is no documented way, and "\" doesn't work.
As you can see, I'm picking nits here. Some shells don't have
history substitution or shell scripts at all.
The Editor (see):
- can't move back to the line just inserted if that line was
inserted before the first line of the file.
In General:
- the terminal interface uses 12-point text, making for less
eye-strain but fewer lines on the screen. This can, of course,
be changed under program control... no way to fix it for the shell
or editor, though.
- I like it. Mouses are great for applications, but give me a shell
and a keyboard-based editor for my programming. You'd need (at
least) three hands to keep up with me if I were using "see" (DeSmet
editor) and you were using MDS Edit.
- There Is A Bug. I havn't reported it to DeSmet yet, although I
called them when (at first) I couldn't get the compiler to work
from the Hyperdrive, and Michael Ouye himself called back and
solved it for me (the shell needs to live on the startup volume).
Anyway, the bug: the compiler generates an extra null in static
data declarations "once in a while". See the SHAR file in net.
sources.mac for the .C and .A (assembler) files that illustrate
this. The bug does not occur on BSD4.2 or VMS 3.7.
So much text, so little information. Sorry about the poor organization.
--
Paul Vixie
{decwrl dual pyramid}!greipa!paul