Path: utzoo!dptcdc!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!csd4.milw.wisc.edu!dogie!uwvax!puff!cat28!blochowi From: blochowi@cat28.CS.WISC.EDU (Jason Blochowiak) Newsgroups: comp.sys.apple Subject: Re: Disassemblers Message-ID: <2584@puff.cs.wisc.edu> Date: 19 Apr 89 02:17:23 GMT References: <8904182009.aa24817@SMOKE.BRL.MIL> Sender: news@puff.cs.wisc.edu Reply-To: blochowi@cat28.CS.WISC.EDU (Jason Blochowiak) Organization: U of Wisconsin CS Dept Lines: 28 I think the original question was the 8 bit Orca vs. Merlin. Merlin does come on a 3.5" disk (at least the more recent versions). Merlin is nice for small development work, but starts to be something of a pain for larger projects (IMHO). As far as APW vs. Orca for the //gs goes, if I remember right, there's more of a difference between them than the macros (a few utility programs worth of difference), but they are the same basic package (things written for one will work with the other one). As to why the macros are different, I'd imagine it's because "ph2" is more cryptic than "PushWord", and Apple seems to prefer things that are less cryptic (more verbose :( ). Not that anyone who understands 6502 should be able to figure out what ph2 does... Matter of philosophy, I guess. From what I saw of the Desktop, it's nice, but it's not fast enough (sound familiar?), even though it is quick compared to most desktop programs. I despise Pascal, so I won't comment on that (lack of knowledge). APW C isn't real great. Although I haven't verified it, it's supposed generate buggy code for x += 1.0; where x is a float. The printf() function is huge (hello.c compiles into somewhere ~30k), and the code isn't particularly efficient. The memory model it uses is reasonable for most things, but it can be a pain. Oh, one thing I saw it do: compile x = y * 5 * 10; into two multiplications and an assignment (why code it that way? In this particular case, I was using a #define'd constant and a hard coded number). Anyways, it works (most of the time). ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Jason Blochowiak (blochowi@garfield.cs.wisc.edu) "Not your average iconoclast..." ------------------------------------------------------------------------------