[Coco] 'head' and 'tail' for CoCo OS-9?

[Gene Heskett]

On Saturday 02 January 2010, Lothan wrote:
>The argc/argv logic is actually handled in cstart.r, which can easily be
>linked with an assembly-language program. If you look at the code in
>cstart.a, you'll see that it sets up the stack, zeroes out the data area,
>parses the command-line arguments, and then branches into main.

Having written some things in C, that was in the back of my mind since back 
in the 80's.  I believe it is also noted in both versions of K&R C.  The 
important part is that it is there & we don't have to re-invent that 
particular wheel.

Our Microware C compilers problems were pretty well concentrated in c.prep, 
and cprep19, which I had a hand in, alleviates the majority of its problems, 
mostly a poor memory for var names and their storage areas once the src code 
files total more than 10k or so, it would scribble all over itself, usually 
without throwing any errors. Till you tried to run its output and got some 
grand and glorious crashes. ;-)

Since rzsz-3.36 is about 34k for the src code for either rz or sz, you cannot 
build a working rzsz on the coco without using cprep19 in place of the 
Microware supplied function.  It is, or was, on rtsi.

That is not to sell short some of the other contributions to the C compiler 
we have available, ansifront-0.12, c.opt2 and CnoY (for coco3 code only) have 
all served us well.

Ansifront goes in front, and converts ansi src code full of voids to 
something our voidless compiler can build, usually without any changes to the 
src code at all.

And as for compiler supervisors, we have several versions of CC, and even an 
older make, which if you get the syntax right in the Makefile, also works 
very well indeed.  I've used them all way back then.

[...]

-- 
Cheers, Gene
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