bchurch@oucsace.cs.OHIOU.EDU (Bob Church) (12/14/89)
I've been following the discussion about C compilers for 8 bit Apples and wanted to add my opinion. I own Orca/M and the Manx C65-c packages. If I wanted to program for the Apple //, period, I'd stick with the Orca assembler. However, I want to learn to program in C. I've been at it on and off now for a year or so and don't feel the least bit comfortable with it yet. But, as my Unix/C instructor told me, if you want to be a C programmer you have to program in C all of the time. In this respect the Manx package is great. If you have a 10 mghz Rocketchip, a Unidisk 3.5 drive and at least a meg of /ram (actually I could use another meg, but I haven't found a way to add it to my //C yet) it's a great learning tool. So the real question, at least IMHO is how badly do you want to learn to program in C. I'm new to C but I think that a lot of the problems in the Manx package are actually results of their efforts to be "true". I can solve problems much easier on the Orca assembler but I can port the Manx programs to the local VAX and compile them. Bob Church att!oucsace!bchurch
pnakada@oracle.com (Paul Nakada) (12/15/89)
In article <924@oucsace.cs.OHIOU.EDU> bchurch@oucsace.cs.OHIOU.EDU (Bob Church) writes:
I've been following the discussion about C compilers for 8 bit Apples
and wanted to add my opinion. I own Orca/M and the Manx C65-c packages.
If I wanted to program for the Apple //, period, I'd stick with the Orca
assembler. However, I want to learn to program in C. I've been at it on
and off now for a year or so and don't feel the least bit comfortable with
it yet. But, as my Unix/C instructor told me, if you want to be a C programmer
you have to program in C all of the time. In this respect the Manx package is
great. If you have a 10 mghz Rocketchip, a Unidisk 3.5 drive and at least a
meg of /ram (actually I could use another meg, but I haven't found a way
to add it to my //C yet) it's a great learning tool. So the real question,
at least IMHO is how badly do you want to learn to program in C. I'm new to
C but I think that a lot of the problems in the Manx package are actually
results of their efforts to be "true". I can solve problems much easier on
the Orca assembler but I can port the Manx programs to the local VAX and
compile them.
Bob Church
att!oucsace!bchurch
Bob and others,
Another approach you might want to take, since you already own
ORCA/M is to purchase the Small C compiler from Byteworks. It's
cheap, it produces ORCA/M compatible p-code, and the source for the
compiler is included. I have ported the compiler to my Sparcstation,
so I can off load the compilation step (the slowest_ from my //c.
Small C source code is fairly portable because it assumes a very
limited machine (ints and pointers the same size, and interchangeable)
There is also a great deal of literature out there dealing with Small
C (look at back issues of Dr. Dobbs).
-Paul Nakada...
P.S. Anyone interested in collaborating on a
"// in a sparc" or "// in a UNIX/X11 box"?ericmcg@pro-generic.cts.com (Eric Mcgillicuddy) (12/21/89)
In-Reply-To: message from pnakada@oracle.com Byte Works smallC is VERY limited,no structures, one dimensional arrays, no formatted print (printf). It does not teach you C except in the most trivial of problems and it is not directly portable to other systems (unless you write it that way i.e. global search and replace 'print' with 'printf') I could not find any bit manipulation functions either. It does inegrate nicely with ORCA/M so it's main use woulb designing front ends for your assmbly modules. It is of course extensible, so you could probably write the neccessary functions for fullC (it is written in itself!!).