Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!cs.utexas.edu!wuarchive!brutus.cs.uiuc.edu!jarthur!uci-ics!rfg
From: rfg@ics.uci.edu (Ronald Guilmette)
Newsgroups: gnu.gcc
Subject: Re: compiling for MS-Dos
Keywords: 80x86
Message-ID: <25E25FC5.9567@paris.ics.uci.edu>
Date: 21 Feb 90 09:30:45 GMT
References: <9002081141.AA01591@wubios.wustl.edu> <1563@cernvax.UUCP>
Reply-To: rfg@ics.uci.edu (Ronald Guilmette)
Distribution: gnu
Organization: UC Irvine Department of ICS
Lines: 30

In article <1563@cernvax.UUCP> antoniop@cernvax.UUCP (antonio pastore) writes:
>I am interested in porting GCC on MSDOS, but for the 80386 only...
...
>2) Port the GCC under MSDOS, using either MSC or TURBO C. I started to
>compile some of the files, but it does not seem to be trivial: GCC has been
>designed to work on 32 bits cpu ('0' is often passed to mean
>NULL [= (char *)0]) and, without prototyping, I really doubt that is possible
>to port it.

Correct.  If GCC were `protoized' (or at the very least, easily "protoizable")
by individual end users (such as yourself) this would make certain porting
tasks much easier, and it would yield other benefits as well (like for
instance finding *some* bugs in GCC at compile-time).

My protoize program could help to convert GCC into an easily protoizable
form.

Basically, you would protoize all of GCC, fix up any errors you got, and
then run unprotoize on the result.  This would yield a version of
GCC which was still portable to all systems that only have an old K&R
compiler, but this new version would be trivially re-protoizable
(using protoize) by any end user who needed a fully prototyped form.

Few (if any) people (other than myself) have shown any enthusiasm for
such a conversion however.


// Ron Guilmette (rfg@ics.uci.edu)
// C++ Entomologist
// Motto:  If it sticks, force it.  If it breaks, it needed replacing anyway.