Path: utzoo!utgpu!water!watmath!clyde!cbosgd!ihnp4!alberta!myrias!cg
From: cg@myrias.UUCP (Chris Gray)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.amiga
Subject: Re: DRACO
Message-ID: <550@myrias.UUCP>
Date: 3 Feb 88 00:46:14 GMT
References: <897@hubcap.UUCP>
Reply-To: cg@myriasa.UUCP (Chris Gray)
Distribution: na
Organization: Myrias Research Corporation
Lines: 60

Draco is still alive and well. There are a few users around town here (Edmonton
Alberta - the frozen north), plus scattered others down in the US of A. There
could also be lots more that I don't know about. As for its current status
with me:

    - I use it for all of my programming on the Amiga
    - since the Draco distribution (Fish disks 76 and 77), I've been busy
       working on:
          - Amiga Empire (a full rewrite of UNIX Empire) - Fish disk 118?
	  - a Canadian content screen hack (coming soon!)
	  - IFF stuff (showILBM with colour cycling)
	  - a truly overkill expansion of my terrain generator, including
	     a colour palette editor requester, a file requester, and a
	     library to ease text menu creation
	  - the Amiga port of my graphics D & D game system. This involved
	     about 4K lines of new code (View, moving Viewports, input.device
	     handler, mouse handling, a sprite, etc. along with a whole new
	     polygon-fill picture editor (to be scrapped, sigh))
	  - small start (the lexical analyzer) for Draco-II (don't hold
	     your breath!)

As for bugs, well there are some that have shown up, but none have been
serious enough to merit a redistribution. Here's the complete list as far
as I know (if anybody knows of any others, PLEASE let me know!):

   - the result of an I/O operation (like read, writeln, etc.) returns a value
     (internally called an IORESULT) which is boolean if used, but can be
     ignored without a message from the compiler. Currently you can't use
     one of these as the return value of a procedure. (Probably a 5 line fix.)

   - Can't currently predeclare a function with a parameter which is an
     array of unknown size. E.g. the compiler won't accept

	extern func([*] int param)int;
	...
	proc func([*] int param)int:
	    ...
	corp;

   - bad code is generated for a construct like this:

	if (x = 'a') ~= (y = 'a') then
	    ...

     I probably forgot to call "putInReg" for the left-hand-side expression
     for a comparison of booleans.

   - include/devices/timer.g     change UINT -> UNIT
     include/exec/interrupts.g   parameter of "Cause" in "*Interrupt_t"
     include/exec/interrupts.g   is_data -> is_Data
     include/intuition/gadget.g  added union types instead of *byte
     a few other minor changes to obscure include files

   - the compiler uses a shift right to do a signed integer divide by a
     constant power of 2. This doesn't work. Oops!

The last two are the only ones I've bothered to fix.
-- 
Chris Gray		Myrias Research, Edmonton	+1 403 428 1616
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