[Coco] NitrOS9 Sources

[Bill Gunshannon]

>
> Bill,
> The answer your question on why all the NitrOS-9 code is in assembler is a
> simple one. There is no OS-9 C cross compler. There's been several
> attempts at it, but the best was (I think) a flaky RSDOS (read non-OS-9,
> non-position independant).

But there is the OS9 C Compiler.

>                            Also, another reason is that most of the
> original OS-9 modules were written in asm. These were disassembled to get
> the sources as the original sources are assumed to be non-existant.

Doesn't that make this a derivitive of OS9 and therefore not free?

And why are the original sources thought to be non-existant?  Did
MicroWare actually say that before their demise?  There were other
derived products like CD-RTOS that had to have copies of the sources.
Copies must exist somewhere.

> Disassembling a program written in C is a nightmare. I will personall
> testify to that.

I've never tried it but I can imagine it is pretty much impossible.
Even disassembling assembler is often more a task than most would think.

> I too would love to see some of this code in C. But in the long run, using
> assembly makes for the fastest, most efficiant code anyway.

I figured efficiency came into the equation somewhere.  :-)

>                                                            If you notice,
> any program included in the NitrOS-9 repository that was originally
> written in C is either copied directly to the disk (compiled) or broken
> down into "FCB"s and "FDB"s of the binary program dump and assembled as a
> module like a BASIC program pokes data into memroy to make a machine
> language program.

Yeah, I really don't understand the point of this last one.  If all
you have are binaries turning them into meaningless sources seems
rather counterproductive.

bill

-- 
Bill Gunshannon          |  de-moc-ra-cy (di mok' ra see) n.  Three wolves
billg999 at cs.scranton.edu |  and a sheep voting on what's for dinner.
University of Scranton   |
Scranton, Pennsylvania   |         #include <std.disclaimer.h>