tm2f+@andrew.cmu.edu (Terence David Murphy) (08/27/87)
I'm fairly new to the Mac scene, and I'm looking for a good Pascal and C
compiler. Since I've worked wtih Turbo Pascal on the IBM, I guess I'll
probably go ahead and buy Turbo Pascal for the Mac (or is there something
better for a decent price?) but the question is which C to get. I want
something to learn the language on but will have extensive advanced
programming techniques available for future use (possibly developing software
on, too). So it boils down to: Which is better, Turbo C or Lightspeed C?
I've heard nice things about Lightspeed C and would assume that Turbo C is as
good as Turbo Pascal (but with what I've heard about Turbo Prolog it may not
necessarily be that way), well I'm sure you have a general idea of what I
want to know, so I'll leave it at that.... Also, is Turbo C @bold{available}
on the Mac yet. This is for use on a Mac SE with a 20 mb HD. Thanks in
advance.
Terencers4u+@ANDREW.CMU.EDU (Richard Siegel) (08/28/87)
If you haven't purchased your Pascal yet, STOP.
Buy Lightspeed Pascal. This is an unbiased recommendation, based on the
fact that Lightspeed Pascal is a far more polished product than is
Turbo. Lightspeed Pascal offers superior project management (a sophisticated
kind of version control is what it is) coupled with very fast compilation and
linkage. IN addition, LSP's symbolic debugging facilities are unmatched
anywhere.
As far as C goes, I don't think Turbo C on the Mac exists yet; in any
case, I would again recommend Lightspeed C -- it's a good cX7 product, and
offers many of the advantages of Lightspeed Pacal -- fast compiler and linker;
in addition, it is *very* HFS-aware, and offers a similar project-management
facility.
I'm not associated with THINK, but I use their products 8 or more
hours a day in the course of my work, so I feel qualified to comment...
--Rich
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-- Sean Connery, in "The Untouchables"brian@ut-sally.UUCP (Brian H. Powell) (08/28/87)
I'm (also) fairly certain Turbo C doesn't exist on the Mac. If it did,
and if it were as good as the IBM-PC version, it would be the best
code-generator around. The IBM version made some awfully big ripples (nay,
tsunamis) in the C pond in which Microsoft was sitting. I don't like LS-C's
code generation (mainly just the complete lack of optimization) at all. I
could probably do a lot of the optimization myself in C if I really wanted to,
but I don't.
(The main optimization I want is common subexpression elimination:
x = ((*current_textedit_hdl)->viewRect.bottom -
(*current_textedit_hdl)->viewRect.top) /
(*current_textedit_hdl)->lineHeight;
The handle gets dereferenced three times in the machine code also. (Yuck)
I usually declare the handle as register, and that helps quite a bit, but it
would be better to declare a TEPtr and dereference it myself. I'd rather the
compiler do that. I guess there could be some debate, since the user knows
better than the compiler about when handles might change.)
Brian