HELP, WE'RE DROWNING!!

[der Mouse]

In article <76 at gypsy.ims.fhg.de>, sievert at gypsy.ims.fhg.de (Karsten Sievert) writes:
> IK00053 at MAINE.MAINE.EDU (The Artful Death Dodger) writes:
>> [...] Turbo C and Turbo Pascal, even bigger dogs than the system
>> itself is)
> I disagree.  Nothing like it on UNIX as far as I know.

Yes, for which I am duly thankful.

> Try it!  It's a pitty that it runns only under DOS.

I did (Turbo C, at least).  The only advantages of it I can see over
the Sun cc is the fine-grained control over warning generation and a
certain degree of ANSIness.  Comparing it to gcc, I see no advantages.

A partial list of disadvantages I find in 2.0 (these are just the ones
I can remember or find in a quick skim of the manuals):

- Memory models
- Not free
- Source not available
- "Integrated" environment's editor is almost unconfigurable
- "text" vs "binary" stupidity in the I/O libraries
- The reference manual says "is available on UNIX systems" about many
   routines which are not present in 4.3BSD.  It's not just a confusion
   of "UNIX" with "System V", either, because they're careful to draw
   the distinction at times; eg, see the entries for assert and dup2.
- For some routines, they say "is available on UNIX systems" when this
   is not true: there is a different routine, with the same name and
   usually with similar functionality, but it is *not* the same.
   (chmod is an example.)
- Make is pretty stupid; in particular, it has no default rules, as far
   as I could tell.

                                        der Mouse

                        old: mcgill-vision!mouse
                        new: mouse at larry.mcrcim.mcgill.edu