HELP, WE'RE DROWNING!!

[The Grey Wolf]

/* <1991Jun24.163819.3125 at email.tuwien.ac.at> by hp at vmars.tuwien.ac.at (Peter Holzer)
 * mouse at thunder.mcrcim.mcgill.edu (der Mouse) writes:
 * 
 * >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.
 * 
 * When I have have to work on an ASCII-Terminal, I see many
 * advantages. E.g. source code and compiler error messages are
 * simultaneously visible.

Use Jove, or rewrite vi to split your screen! :-).
(Yes, it's a preference which many don't share because they're too used
 to vi's paradigm, and this is a "religious" argument, but it is a solution
 if one wishes to accept it.  Too bad there were no backups when the
 machine which held the windowing vi sources happened to lose the disk upon
 which said sources resided...)

Truly, it is a pity that there isn't something of a similar environment
on a UNIX box, though I imagine something could be written...

 * If I have an X-terminal, still one advantage
 * remains. The debugger. Turbo-Debugger is the best debugger I have ever
 * seen. Dbx isn't more powerful, and not nearly as comfortable.

Dbx and adb, while powerful to some degree, certainly lack something
when it comes to the user interface.  I guess that the rationale was that
"users don't debug programs, programmers do".  Also a pity.

What drives ME crazy is that you cannot indirect an arbitrary value in
dbx; also, there is no way to set a radix in which you wish to view values.
Figuring out a mode word (device + permissions) is kind of insane unless
you're very good at doing decimal <--> octal conversions.  Addresses are
automagically mapped to hex, which is good, but everything else is either
mapped to a string, a byte or a (decimal) int (I don't use floats much).

Adb is just plain cryptic; it's the closest to write-only coding that
I've ever done.

How about Saber C?  I understand that works pretty well.

 * 
 * >- "Integrated" environment's editor is almost unconfigurable

Well, it's configurable, but there are certain keys you cannot map
(like ESCAPE! AARRRGGHH!).