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From: rosalia@reed.UUCP (Mark Galassi)
Newsgroups: net.micro.atari
Subject: developer's package
Message-ID: <2023@reed.UUCP>
Date: Sat, 19-Oct-85 14:50:06 EDT
Article-I.D.: reed.2023
Posted: Sat Oct 19 14:50:06 1985
Date-Received: Mon, 21-Oct-85 06:41:14 EDT
Reply-To: rosalia@reed.UUCP (Mark Galassi)
Distribution: net
Organization: Reed College, Portland, Oregon
Lines: 52

[]

    I finally got a chance to browse through the ST developer's package.
I don't think I saw the full-blown package, missing were docs to
"mince", the new editor "micro-emacs", "kermit" (but there are hundreds
of pages of docs for "kermit"). Also missing (that I noticed) was the
DDT debugger (or whatever name they gave it). Can anyone tell me if I
was really missing that stuff or you didn't see it either?

    My questions, having used it for a while and read the documentation,
is the following:

1) the documentation really points to the OS being based on CP/M68k,
there is no mention ever made of MS-DOS (except for when they say that
GEM was originally meant for the PC, but can be ported to other
architectures). Then why do people here say that it is not a CP/M68k
derivative? The compiler-assembler-linker produce CP/M68k executable
files, and then there is a utility which converts to GEM applications.
Unless there is some other info that I am missing, this seems to say
quite convincingly that the OS on the ST comes straight from CP/M68k.

2) Using this system I tried to compile a simple program, it worked fine
and fast enough (the floppies on this system are really fast!!), then it
assembled (a bit slower, but still fast compared to all compilers I've
seen on the Mac with the possible exception of Rascal). Then:

 HOW DO YOU INVOKE THE LINKER ON A FILE "hello.o" which uses the
 documented library function "printf()" and nothing else?

this is what I tried : I installed "link68" as a "tos application with
arguments", which means that the program asks me for arguments. Then I
called it up giving it as arguments "hello.o". It told me (quite
expectably) that "_printf() was unresolved". Then I tried giving it
other files I found on the disk together with "hello.o", for example
"gems.o", "acstart.o", "gemlib".... but in those cases it returned to
the desktop before I could even see the error message.

    There are a couple of batch files " linka.bat" and "linkb.bat", but
both of them want as input file "file.68k" rather than "file.o". In such
a case, my question boils down to "how do I get a 'file.68k' rather than
a 'file.o' file????????????????".

    Sorry for the long and verbose questions. One last thing is: does
this system really not have floats and doubles? The documentation says
NO, but then lists the function calls "atof" etc.... Other than this
confusion of mine, I think the package is nice to work with and there
are a lot of utilities.

     Thank you very much,
					Mark Galassi
				...!tektronix!reed!rosalia
				...!tektronix!tekig4!rosalia