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From: mo@seismo.CSS.GOV (Mike O'Dell)
Newsgroups: net.micro.pc
Subject: Lattice vs. Microsoft 3.0
Message-ID: <85@seismo.CSS.GOV>
Date: Thu, 29-Aug-85 08:19:59 EDT
Article-I.D.: seismo.85
Posted: Thu Aug 29 08:19:59 1985
Date-Received: Sat, 31-Aug-85 06:14:55 EDT
Organization: Center for Seismic Studies, Arlington, VA
Lines: 21
Keywords: eternal compiler woes

Both compilers are very good, but they both have serious lossages:

(1) Microsoft doesn't do pointer arithmetic for large model programs
	correctly - they only do the bottom 16 bits and then wave their
	hands about the segment part.  They do generate all the data
	segments needed (see next entry).

(2) Lattice does the pointer arithmetic correctly, but only generates one
	Data/BSS segment per program, causing problems with large
	programs having much initialized data.

There seems to be some kind of debate going on about whether C users will
tolerate the performance loss to do pointer arithmetic correctly.  Well,
as a person with a VERY large program which manipulates objects which
can potentially be larger than 64Kbytes, I would rather have the program
work right and slower, than chase down all the pointer adds which might
overflow and insert subroutine calls to do it correctly.  Lord knows
this later fixup slows it down.

	Wishing someone would do a compiler which does it right,
	-Mike O'Dell