Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!unsvax!jimi!tahoe!apple!shebs
From: shebs@Apple.COM (Stan Shebs)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.mac.programmer
Subject: Clarification about MPW C vs MPW GCC
Keywords: MPW, C, GCC
Message-ID: <11395@goofy.Apple.COM>
Date: 30 Nov 90 19:44:28 GMT
Organization: Apple Computer Inc., Cupertino, CA
Lines: 25

In yesterday's announcement of the release of MPW GCC, I said that
you need to have MPW C in order to use GCC.  Some people were
confused, so here's a clarification:

MPW GCC is actually a script "gC" and a pair of tools "cpp" and
"cc1".  Their output is an assembly file that must be passed
through Asm.  So, the MPW C compiler is not directly involved.
If you have your own includes and C runtime libraries, you can
use those to build apps, but most people are going to want to
use the set that comes with MPW C (and which is *not* included
in the GCC distribution).

MPW GCC can compile itself, but it also assumes that the MPW C
includes and libraries are available.  Too, in order to build
a GCC that will run on 68000+SANE machines, it is necessary to
compile it with MPW C (a bug that we've never fixed, sorry).

Finally, we assume that GCC users already have a copy of the MPW C
manual, so we don't include any details about Apple's C extensions.

To summarize, MPW C is not strictly necessary to use MPW GCC,
but it's not really practical to use MPW GCC without it.

						Stan Shebs
						Apple ATG System Software