Date   : Mon, 04 Oct 1982 23:18:47 EST (Monday)
From   : Mike Meyer <mwm@Okc-Unix>
Subject: Re: Reply to: software toolworks c/80

I feel that I have to add my two cents to the comments on c/80 (version II).
I tried to use it, and gave up in utter disgust. I have never gotten anything
of mine to compile, in spite of 4 years of coding C.

The problems I had were numerous. First, and most obvious, was the library.
Or lack thereof (I confess to being spoiled by Leor & Unix). What was worse,
the supplied printf (the standard C print routine) didn't work when you
told it to output hex. Since the CALLED routine unstacks arguments,
all functions have to be called with the number of arguments that they
are declared with. The contortions to get around this in the print routine
made it somewhat akin to hieroglyphics in readability. There are other,
more subtle bugs in the I/O library (then again, they may be in my code -
but it works under other compilers).

Second, you could not have unions declared outside a function. The compiler
(rightly) declares that you can't initialize a union. You then declare
one outside of a function, and it tries to initialize it to zeros. But this
is illegal...

Third, when the compiler runs out of disk space, it starts merrily dumping
its assembler output to the screen, with (apparently) no way to shut it
off. Since the compiler is written in itself, I assume that the same problems
will appear in user programs.

Last, and what I consider worst, when I spoke to the author about the problems
in his compiler, his attitude seemed to be `Why are you bothering me?'

Caveat: The version of the compiler I bought is (now) about 6 months old.
Some of the problems may have been fixed. Also, I do know people who have
gotten code to run with the compiler (after rewriting the I/O library from
the ground up). They STILL hate the thing.

       mike