[Coco] Which version of C?

[Gene Heskett]

On Monday, January 12, 2015 04:36:07 AM K. Pruitt did opine
And Gene did reply:
> ----- Original Message -----
> From: "Gene Heskett" <gheskett at wdtv.com>
> To: "CoCoList for Color Computer Enthusiasts" <coco at maltedmedia.com>
> Sent: Monday, January 12, 2015 1:16 AM
> Subject: Re: [Coco] Which version of C?
> 
> > On Sunday, January 11, 2015 11:32:37 PM K. Pruitt did opine
> > 
> > And Gene did reply:
> >> There seems to be a couple of different versions of C floating
> >> around out there.  On a coco 3 with a 6809 running NitrOS9 level
> >> 2, which version of C should I be running?
> >> 
> >> I remember not really caring for the first C that Tandy had for
> >> OS9. And that was my first exposure to C so it kind of soured me
> >> on C for a long time. I used Turbo C from Borland for a bit. That
> >> was pretty fun. And I meddled with GCC a bit and it wasn't too
> >> disastrous. So I am thinking maybe I'll give C on the Coco another
> >> shot.
> >> 
> >> Thanks.
> > 
> > That Tandy C compiler, written my Microware, has a generally good
> > code generator, but some of the support functions were broken. We
> > now have a much better c.prep I had a hand in, and Willard Goosey
> > has since improved even more, and that c.prep v19b should be
> > considered as a total replacement for the tandy supplied version. 
> > Several others have supplied additional translators and code
> > optimizers.  If you want to feed it normal ansi C, with void's and
> > such, then you will run the output of c.prep thru ansifront.13,
> > which translates the voids to something the compiler in c.comp or
> > the chained c.pass1 and c.pass2 can understand. Then we've an
> > improved c.opt2, and your choice of driving scripts, there are
> > several for sequencing the whole maryann.
> > 
> > But the best optimizer is the human brain. By interrupting the
> > compiler and inspecting the assembly code as it would be sent to
> > c.asm (or rma today) and spend some time looking for bit shift
> > loops that shift by 8 one way or the other, nuke that code and sub
> > a tfr, clear statement pair in its place. That is one of the tricks
> > that took rzsz from just barely keeping up with a 2400 baud modem,
> > aka 240 bytes a second to nearly 720 bytes a second running on a
> > 6309. That, and changing to a table lookup crc which is much faster
> > than calculating it.
> > 
> > Cheers, Gene Heskett
> 
> Wow, Gene, I almost understood about 80% of that.  I normally only
> understand about half of what you're saying.  But I always flag your
> messages as important because even understanding only half of what
> you're talking about is like walking through a gold mine with nuggets
> strewn about just waiting to be picked up.  Eventually I'll
> understand even more of the gems you share here.  Thanks for doing
> so.  I wrote an Xmodem CRC utility for OS-9 years ago and the math
> was so extensive and honestly way above my head (polynomials?) and
> that actually helped me understand your code optimization comments.
> I'm still very fond of using tables instead of cycle-eating math when
> I can.
> 
> By the way, my thanks also goes out to Robert Gault and a quite a few
> others here for all the great help you guys share here.
 
I appreciate the flowers, thanks.  But as I "wind down" from the wear and 
tear of the years, I am happy that there are others with more giddyup, 
and willingness to learn, joining our group as the years go by.  The last 
5 or so years has seen several folks join that think of something the 
coco needs, or could do, and they do it! Progress is what drives us.

We all have something to contribute, and as a learning experience, the 
coco is very hard to beat because the price of admission is low enough 
that the baby won't go hungry if you buy one. That alone gets more people 
interested in raising the hood to see whats in it.  And that can't be 
anything but good.

Discovering the initial os9 offering was a breath of fresh air to me 
because it came with ALL the tools needed to make it do whatever came to 
mind.  Nothing except linux has matched that versatility since.

Historically, I have only bought one copy of win xp, it came on a laptop 
I bought so I could "stay in touch" when I was in Iron Mountain for any 
extended time, but when I found that the xp drivers could not drive the 
wifi radio in it, the xp got blown away and an early version of Mandrake 
installed.  That is my only windows experience, and having helped clean 
up some of the junk a windows machine will collect in 10 minutes of 
online time (that BTW is the average life of a windows machine connected 
directly to the net before some hacker owns it) I have stayed with the 
fringe machines, going to the amiga when the coco wasn't fast enough, 
building it up to full house, then building my first linux machine, this 
is the 4th, all without ever having a copy of windows on the premisis.

So thats a bit of my history.  In my travels thru the broadcast field, I 
have tended to identify a labor intensive job at whatever station I was 
at, and building & programming a computer to do that repetitive, time 
accurate demanding, job for the stations production help.   That involved 
learning to program the RCA 1802 by entering the hex codes in a hex 
monitor program, an interesting experience because the 1802's 
architecture is much different, ditto for the Z-80, and then the 6809.

I'd found my niche in the grand scheme of things.  And I have filled that 
shelf with useful stuff.  I had a coco2 doing a job at WDTV for about 15 
years that the Grass Valley Group sold for a $20,000 check, but my coco2 
version was 4x faster & had english filenames that their extremely 
primitive lashup didn't have. I even used some of the tools I wrote to 
reach into that switcher and identify a bad chip, probably doing it 10x 
faster that poking at it with a scope probe, and I'm very good at that 
too.

I can remember about 76 of the last 80 years, and its been quite a ride, 
bumpy here and there, starting with my first wifes death from a stroke in 
'68, and all of the children she gave me, just recently the last of them, 
a boy that booze took over, the 2 girls from cancer having passed 
previously.

That old saw about a man is not supposed to outlive his kids is quite 
true, so those periods are sad indeed. All I have left now are 4 boys, 
one of which came with the 2nd wife and who had sense enough to leave 
when I didn't. So now I've just celebrated if you could call it that, she 
has COPD so our celebrations are quite low key, 25 years with my 3rd, a 
now long since retired music teacher who was born about 2 miles from 
here.

Small town West Virginia has been good to me, except for the fishing.  
Needs more trout & walleyes.  Hunting is decent, but the deer are small 
as they are in warmer climes.  Warm being relative as we've been close to 
0F here all this past week. But warming up a bit, I see it is 1.1C now at 
the local airport. 34 degrees.

So thats the weather report from Weston WV for this morning, enjoy!  ;-)

Cheers, Gene Heskett
-- 
"There are four boxes to be used in defense of liberty:
 soap, ballot, jury, and ammo. Please use in that order."
-Ed Howdershelt (Author)
Genes Web page <http://geneslinuxbox.net:6309/gene>
US V Castleman, SCOTUS, Mar 2014 is grounds for Impeaching SCOTUS