jwilson@sunb2.cso.uiuc.edu (02/02/90)
Well, I just got my Manx 5.0 upgrade, and if I were to sum it up in one word, that word would be: professional. The nifty install program provided is very nice, and I got the 4 disks installed onto my hard disk very easily on the first try. The manual looks very sharp. My only complaint is that there are 5 different indexes for the 5 "books" in it. I haven't had the time to give it a complete examination, but in the few example programs I have compiled, it took a little longer to compile (must be the optimizer). I haven't compiled any of my own code yet (to test old versus new), since all the compiler options are different, and I need to change my makefiles. They do provide a 3.6 compatability mode, which accepts the options in the old format. The compiler now defaults to 32 bit ints, with 16 bit ints as an option. Floating point now defaults to a new Manx IEEE floating point standard, which is supposed to be the most acurate of all the libraries, all the old libraries are still supported. There is now a version of SDB that can handle fast floating point. If you include functions.h, the compiler now generates inline calls to Amiga resident library routines, rather than calling an assembly language stub. And, according to the read.me file, they no longer support single drive systems, you must have either 2 floppies or a hard disk. I can understand this because the compiler alone is now almost 150K on the disk, and, as I said, the distribution comes on 4 disks. A bare minimum system probably covers 2 disks completely. Well, I'm sure there will be a lot of discussion on the net in the next few weeks about this sucker, these are just my first impressions. DISCLAIMER: I'm just a poor student, with no affilations to anyone. I say what it occurs to me to say when I think I here people say things. More, I cannot say. Jeff Wilson University of Illinois-Urbana, Champaign jwilson@cs.uiuc.edu uiucdcs!jwilson