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From: ked@garnet.berkeley.edu (Earl H. Kinmonth)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.ibm.pc
Subject: Re: Trouble compiling flip with TurboC 1.5
Message-ID: <26586@agate.BERKELEY.EDU>
Date: 22 Jul 89 15:45:28 GMT
References: <26514@agate.BERKELEY.EDU> <1105@unocss.UUCP>
Sender: usenet@agate.BERKELEY.EDU
Reply-To: ked@garnet.berkeley.edu (Earl H. Kinmonth)
Organization: University of California, Berkeley
Lines: 35

In article <1105@unocss.UUCP> ho@fergvax.unl.edu writes:
>From article <26514@agate.BERKELEY.EDU>, by ked@garnet.berkeley.edu (Earl H. Kinmonth):
>> of your problem;  the rest is in the parameters.  Beg, borrow, or steal
>> TC 2.0.  It's (almost) good!
>
>What would you consider a (not almost, but actually) good PC C compiler?

One that allowed larger programs to be debugged.

>I had TC 1.5.  The only deviations I noticed from **IX were the maddening
>ssignal(), and a few machine-specific things (replacing opendir/readdir
>with findfirst/findnext, totally different ioctl, etc.) things that 
>most likely could not have been easily fixed.

There is more than that. I spend hours writing a decent system()
function that recognizes SHELL, COMSPEC, and the current setting of the
switchar.

utime() and a number of other **IX functions available in MSC were not
and still are not part of the Turbo C library.

getenv() and chdir() were buggy in the initial version as were a number
of other routines.

I almost forgot the biggest pisser of all, the inability of TC 2.0 to
work with lines terminated only by line-feeds, and worse yet, the
failure to detect this problem in many cases. (TC 1.0 actually worked
in this case.)

Before you respond that CR/LF is the MSDOS convention and TC is a MSDOS
compiler, let me give you my rebuttal. First, LF lines did work in TC
1.0. Second, it takes MORE code to require the CR/LF than not to.
Third, since a major selling point of C is portability, TC should not
make moving code anymore difficult than is required by the underlying
platform.