If there are so many C compilers for MSDOS PC's .....

[Andrew Sharpe]

{ihnp4,decvax,allegra}!philabs!hhb!bob writes:
> 
> How come I can't seem to find one which fits my requirements ?
> 
> Our application expects a large, linear address space which can be gotten
> out of the 8088/8086/80286 environment using large model compilers, but there
> always seems to be a snag.
> 
> Here are my requirements.
> 
> 1. A full K&R C compiler implementation.
> 2. Bitfields which can be declared as either 16 or 32 bits in size.
> 3. The ability to dynamically allocate memory in chunks which might
>    be larger than 64k bytes.

A couple of comments. First, large model in no way gives you a 'linear'
architecture in the pure sense. Second, K&R defines ( albeit vaguely )
bit fields to work with the 'int' type only, whatever that happens
to be on your implementation. Third, allocation of huge arrays on the
Intel architecture requires an implementation of brk ( or sbrk )
that guarantees contiguous allocation. Even then, accessing this
huge data structure as an array requires help from the compiler,
probably implementing a 'contiguous selector' algorithm.
-- 
				Andrew Sharpe
		{ ihnp4, mot, ucscc, amdahl } !drivax!sharpe