Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!samsung!usc!zaphod.mps.ohio-state.edu!uakari.primate.wisc.edu!uflorida!haven!mimsy!mojo!dank
From: dank@eng.umd.edu (Daniel R. Kuespert)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.ibm.pc.programmer
Subject: Re: Turbo C or MSC
Message-ID: <1990Mar27.182924.5444@eng.umd.edu>
Date: 27 Mar 90 18:29:24 GMT
References: <924@ns-mx.uiowa.edu> <1468@watserv1.waterloo.edu> <9944@pyr.gatech.EDU> <35104@cci632.UUCP> <2602972a.42b0@polyslo.CalPoly.EDU> <1990Mar26.154024.11739@dasys1.uucp> <1990Mar26.174313.1976@eng.umd.edu> <26942@ut-emx.UUCP>
Sender: news@eng.umd.edu (The News System)
Organization: Maryversity of Uniland, College Park
Lines: 41

In article <26942@ut-emx.UUCP> boerner@emx.UUCP (Brendan B. Boerner) writes:
>In article <1990Mar26.174313.1976@eng.umd.edu> dank@eng.umd.edu (Daniel R. Kuespert) writes:
>>Both Quick C and Turbo C's integrated debuggers are toys,
>>more suitable for home use; with the Turbo C Professional package you get
>>Turbo Debugger, which is a considerable improvement on the Turbo C
>
>I have seen comments similiar to the above and finally decided to find
>out what I am missing.  I have spent the last year working on a 33,000+
>line application written in Turbo Pascal and estimate that I have used
>the Integrated Enviroment ~90% of the time.  The other 10% of the time
>I used the Turbo Debugger in order to debug assembler.
>
>It is true that I was at home while writing the code (:-)), but I think
>that I was able to be more productive since a) the IDE compiled/linked
>my code faster than the command line compiler, and b) I could compile
>and run, not compile, load the debugger, load the .EXE, and then run.

I hadn't meant to say that TD is better than the IDE debugger in all
circumstances.  For small and/or simple programs, the IDE is quite enough.
Additionally, the early stages of (attempting to) compile a larger program
call for the use of the IDE if at all possible, since it takes some time before
all the stupid mistakes (like calling scanf() with variable values rather
than pointers, which I'm _still_ doing after 2+ years of C experience) are
worked out.  Nevertheless, I've found TD to be invaluable for debugging 
errors in the (numerical) software I sometimes write.  The ability to
follow a linked list and the flexibility of TD's breakpoints are quite useful.

I'm not sure of how much of an advantage that TD would give over the TP
IDE debugger, simply because of the differences between the two languages.
With Turbo C, you have to use the command line compiler for a few things,
like using inline assembler or isolating the assembly code that tcc produces.

regards,
dan

Daniel R. Kuespert
Chemical Process Systems Laboratory
University of Maryland, College Park, MD
dank@eng.umd.edu

WhY ArE ``TeX'' AnD ``LaTeX'' So HaRd To TyPe?