Relay-Version: version B 2.10 5/3/83; site utzoo.UUCP Path: utzoo!mnetor!seismo!ut-sally!husc6!sri-unix!sri-spam!ames!ucbcad!ucbvax!jade!eris!mwm From: mwm@eris.BERKELEY.EDU (Mike (No one lives forever.) Meyer) Newsgroups: comp.sys.amiga Subject: Re: Amiga good for hacking?? Message-ID: <2727@jade.BERKELEY.EDU> Date: Mon, 9-Mar-87 09:58:12 EST Article-I.D.: jade.2727 Posted: Mon Mar 9 09:58:12 1987 Date-Received: Tue, 10-Mar-87 22:32:38 EST References: <2719@well.UUCP> <2705@jade.BERKELEY.EDU> <2736@well.UUCP> Sender: usenet@jade.BERKELEY.EDU Reply-To: mwm@eris.BERKELEY.EDU (Mike (No one lives forever.) Meyer) Distribution: world Organization: Missionaria Phonibalonica Lines: 53 In article <2736@well.UUCP> ewhac@well.UUCP (Leo 'Bols Ewhac' Schwab) writes: >>Carefull, there - the stuff written in England is what provides all >>the nice message passing, library primitives, resource allocation and >>etc. that people like so much. I think that the real crud is in the >>attempt to mate a BCPL system with a C system. >> > Not correct (at least I'm 99.9999% sure it's not correct). AmigaDOS >was written in BCPL and crufted on top of the Exec. You're right. See my previous posting "Subject: AmigaDOS & Tripos (was: etc.)" for details. >The real problem with DOS may indeed >be the poor BCPL/C interface (Did you know BCPL stacks grow upwards in >memory? Did you know that BCPL uses D0 as an address register? Yuk.), but >I prefer to believe that it was either a sleazy BCPL compiler, or the >MetaComCo programmers were suffering from braindeath :-). I've not played with a 68K BCPL compiler. The 370 compiler was incredible. PL/O was a little better. VS/FORTRAN was better. Nothing else could touch it. (Example: it compiled a switch into either a then/else chain, a binary search, or a hash table, depending on how large the switch was.) The compiler was structured sorta-kinda like PCC, so it wouldn't surprise me if the same compiler was used on the 68K. BTW, did you know that lots of Unix 68K C compilers use D0 to hold addresses? > It does? Is this a new addition to their standard package? Or do >they bundle MetaComCo's assembler with it? > Mike is quite correct; my statement concerning Lattice is quite >subjective. I haven't used Lattice of late, but speaking personally, I like >my compilers to be "single" pass (i.e. I don't have to invoke two seperate >commands), to compile to assembly, and have a reasonably UNIX-like command >structure. Like I said, I haven't used Lattice of late, so they may have >addressed all these issues. His first question is about an assembler. Yes, Lattice 3.10 comes with an assembler, in all it's packages. It's not the MetaComCo assembler; it's one of theirs. They also have a driver with Unix-like command structure (which I threw out in favor of cc, of course), make, editors, etc, most of which I could care less about. They also give you the metascope debugger (heaven, if only it spoke C instead of assembler!), and omd, which gives me back the assembler in a .o file, with the C statements that generated that code. The resulting system (with a couple of meg of memory) makes for a _nice_ development environment. I prefer it to a Sun.