naga@wet.UUCP (Peter Davidson) (10/01/90)
A recent poster asked about an "inexpensive and good Toolbox for C". I am connected with the development of a new C function library which is due for publication in a month or so and, with the permission of the developer, here is an informal pre- release description. This toolbox is a general purpose library for use with Microsoft C 5.10 and 6.00 under MS-DOS (other compilers later). It has about 300 functions which fall into the general categories of: string, keyboard, video, printer, file, disk, date, time, window, menu, mouse, pixel and miscellaneous. There are numerous functions which are not found in other libraries, e.g. conversion between dates and the astronomical Julian day number system and functions which allow simultaneous output to screen, printer and textfile, as well as many functions for small, specialized tasks. It has an advanced text-based windowing system and provides the ability to create menus and dialog boxes. Video output may be via direct memory access (for speed) or optionally via the bios. Unlike some user interface libraries, this one is fully compatible with CodeView, having been debugged with it. It is meant to be an easy-to-use toolbox for the people as well as for professional developers and probably the initial price will be $99 (despite strenuous requests from some in the marketing department to put it in the $200-$300 range). Full details will be available next month in the official product release announcement. To get on the mailing list send your address to the publisher, Dolphin Software, 48 Shattuck Square #147, Berkeley, CA 94704. If anyone has any special requests (for functions, that is) then email them to me and you may see them in the library. The developer aims to provide useful functions in most areas except for communications, EGA/VGA graphics and multi-tasking.