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Re: [LUG] BBC Micro anyone anywhere anytime

 

On 18/05/14 12:28, Philip Hudson wrote:
On 18 May 2014 11:27, Tom <madtom1999@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
On 17/05/14 22:35, Philip Hudson wrote:
On 17 May 2014 21:34, Gordon Henderson <gordon+lug@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
No, but I've programmed in C on both. Can't say I noticed any difference.
Ever tried the built-in (reluctantly, I'd say) C compiler on a VAX?

What was wrong with that? Mind you I learned my C on that - and a Superbrain
with an EIL problem.

If you *learned* C on that, it was probably fine -- though I bet the
K&R book wasn't your tutorial. The trouble with it came for anyone who
learned their C anywhere else. There were at the time two "standards",
colloquially known as K&R (after the book) and ANSI (after the, er,
standard). There was also Borland's Turbo C, which was widely
understood to be in a world of its own, and not for malicious or
incompetent reasons, though I think in the end even Borland admitted
they shouldn't have changed the language as they did. Anyway, the VAX
C compiler would not compile a non-trivial program that compiled on C
compilers for either K&R or ANSI C on all other platforms. This was
late '80s, early '90s. My example was a dumb tree for a dictionary
with recursive-descent search and insert functions which I co-wrote
with my brother for a college assignment he had. No external
libraries, nothing but stdlib and stdio. Compiled and ran as expected
without tweaking on Mac, DOS, SunOS and Dynix; took hours and hours of
porting on VMS. I don't know what the solution was in the end, I had
to head off and leave it to my brother.

I'd learned other languages before so quirks were not really a problem - you just bit the bullet and carried on or submitted a bug report. I cant remember what the C compiler on the Superbrain II was but I remember typing in Jimmy Henrix's Small C compiler and tools on the Vax as a learning experience - that was fun! Ran about 10 times as fast too! I should add I was lucky to be a chip designer where not only did we have lots of state of the art equipment and software but some Design Rule Checking jobs on the chips took days if not weeks to run so there was plenty of time for research.
Tom te tom te tom

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