raymond@ptolemy.arc.nasa.gov (Eric A. Raymond) (10/25/89)
Enough, move this discussion to alt.religion, please. As long as I'm here, I can't resist adding my two cents worth: I've used TC for a while now. The environment is excellent but there is room for improvement. The editor has serious problems (i.e., one file at a time, tedious to copy between files, no history function (when you save, let me add a doc string to the header), no tag functionality (find function X; this is in TD), no undo for killing lines (give me kill/yank), etc ....) The pick file is a lifesaver. The make system is slightly brain damaged, poorly documented, incompatible with the standalone system. In fact, there is no simple way to run your program in the integrated environment without doing some sort of make. (Sure you can turn off dependecies, and then do a run, but there is still some sort of make going on). It is difficult to get the system to do non-standard things (use a different startup library, filter x through y, rebuild the library) which are so easy to do with stand alone make. The autodependency hack is really nice, but why not let automagically add these dependencies to your project file? (This must be a trivial hack? Yet another argument for free source code to your utilities) There is no reason why I should've have been forced to leave the integrated environment as my needs grow (FYI, one of my systems has special, protected mode needs. Things crash and burn inside of the integrated environment (iinsists on using it's startup code and libraries). I use freemacs/make/tcc/tlink for this program. (On aside, I could use 32-bit code generation, but I'm not that naiive.) The integrated debugger is nice, but is missing some simple, useful things, too. There is no reason for it not to be a subset (i.e., user interface, functionality) of the standalone debugger. Then again, I'm never satisfied; why should I? Turbo C is an excellent product and provides an excellent integrated environment (but it's not emacs). The product suffers from lack of consistency between obviously independently developed software (TC versus TCC, make, tlink, TD), but there are obvious tradeoffs here. They also throw in a lot on neat things (like virtual 86 mode debugging to give your program all 640K, remote debugging, an extremely simple (albeit inflexible) integrated make) My expectations tend to be high and cull from my experience on a variety of platforms (PC's, Unix, LISPM's). I'll always break things and want more. Anyone care to forward this to Borland? -- Eric A. Raymond (raymond@ptolemy.arc.nasa.gov) G7 C7 G7 G#7 G7 G+13 C7 GM7 Am7 Bm7 Bd7 Am7 C7 Do13 G7 C7 G7 D+13: Elmore James
fredex@cg-atla.UUCP (Fred Smith) (10/25/89)
In article <2690@edison.ptolemy.arc.nasa.gov> raymond@edison.arc.nasa.gov.UUCP (Eric A. Raymond) writes: >Enough, move this discussion to alt.religion, please. > >(but it's not emacs). Seaking of religion, Thank God! (that it's not emacs!)