wee@iris.ucdavis.edu (Chris Wee) (10/28/88)
>If anyone has used either C/NIX or C/80, could they please post their >opinions on the worth of these programs? I bought C/80 for my H-89 CP/M computer many, many moons ago. Back then, I couldn't afford anything else and @ $49, I thought C/80 was the greatest thing since sliced bread. I still feel that way. I received updates for longs and float/doubles later and some other stuff, so you can do serious work with it. For $49, it a an extremely stable and solid product. Yes, C/80 is missing a few things - bit fields and I can't remember what else, but it produces fairly tight code and has a farily fast compile time. Dr. Dobbs published an article featuring a peephole optimizer for Z80/8080 C compilers a few years ago and that optimizer is available in their C Chest. I still write software for embedded controllers using the Z-80, but not using C/80 unfortunately. I still wish I could switch to it... Chris
wilker@batcomputer.tn.cornell.edu (Clarence W. Wilkerson Jr.) (10/29/88)
I used it for a couple of years. Only bug I remembered finding was in getting the size of a union. But at least it had unions and structs, and it compiled most pre-ansi style c. It produces .asm code in rmac or m80 variety, and perhaps for an included assembler also. Other disadvantages were caused by the operating system. The 70k source file for the Dr. Dobbs C editor from 1982 took about 20 minutes on a floppy based system to compile and link.
secrist@msdsws.DEC.COM (Richard Secrist, Digital Equip. Corp. USA) (11/04/88)
If you want to hack C for yourself under CP/M-80 C/80 is a good price/performance product for small floppy-based systems. It was reasonably K & R and had all the normal functions and was easy to port stuff into. If you're a general hacker and program in a number of languages you should be pleased. If you are an esoteric C hacker doing big-time C you should get out the bucks and spring for Aztec C. C/80 didn't compile through a bunch of inordinate steps or take significantly longer than it should for what it was doing, so I was happy enough with it in the limited environments I was playing in. I used Whitesmith's C for CP/M at the same shop and while it was robust I thought I'd go nuts going through all of the compiling and linking steps, waiting and waiting... it wasn't worth it for light-duty home hackery and cost too much. Aztec C was best if you're going to spend significant amounts of time in C. C/80 is fine for recreational C programming. rcs