Path: utzoo!attcan!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!cs.utexas.edu!uwm.edu!genbank!apple!oracle!news From: pnakada@oracle.com (Paul Nakada) Newsgroups: comp.sys.apple Subject: Re: C compilers for the // Message-ID: Date: 14 Dec 89 19:42:34 GMT References: <924@oucsace.cs.OHIOU.EDU> Sender: news@oracle.com Organization: Oracle Corperation, Belmont, CA Lines: 36 In-reply-to: bchurch@oucsace.cs.OHIOU.EDU's message of 14 Dec 89 02:33:29 GMT In article <924@oucsace.cs.OHIOU.EDU> bchurch@oucsace.cs.OHIOU.EDU (Bob Church) writes: I've been following the discussion about C compilers for 8 bit Apples and wanted to add my opinion. I own Orca/M and the Manx C65-c packages. If I wanted to program for the Apple //, period, I'd stick with the Orca assembler. However, I want to learn to program in C. I've been at it on and off now for a year or so and don't feel the least bit comfortable with it yet. But, as my Unix/C instructor told me, if you want to be a C programmer you have to program in C all of the time. In this respect the Manx package is great. If you have a 10 mghz Rocketchip, a Unidisk 3.5 drive and at least a meg of /ram (actually I could use another meg, but I haven't found a way to add it to my //C yet) it's a great learning tool. So the real question, at least IMHO is how badly do you want to learn to program in C. I'm new to C but I think that a lot of the problems in the Manx package are actually results of their efforts to be "true". I can solve problems much easier on the Orca assembler but I can port the Manx programs to the local VAX and compile them. Bob Church att!oucsace!bchurch Bob and others, Another approach you might want to take, since you already own ORCA/M is to purchase the Small C compiler from Byteworks. It's cheap, it produces ORCA/M compatible p-code, and the source for the compiler is included. I have ported the compiler to my Sparcstation, so I can off load the compilation step (the slowest_ from my //c. Small C source code is fairly portable because it assumes a very limited machine (ints and pointers the same size, and interchangeable) There is also a great deal of literature out there dealing with Small C (look at back issues of Dr. Dobbs). -Paul Nakada... P.S. Anyone interested in collaborating on a "// in a sparc" or "// in a UNIX/X11 box"?