Date   : Mon, 30 Jan 1984 23:24:00-PST (Monday)
From   : Tony Li <Tli@usc-eclb>
Subject: DRI 'C'.

Hi,

The 8086 version of the DRI 'C' compiler was done by Mike Lehman (of
Pascal-MT+) fame.  It is supposedly a fairly complete implementation.
I am very much not impressed with the code that it generates, however.
I have also had problems with this compiler under CCP/M.  If you
switch consoles while it's running, use some memory, and then it goes
to allocate some memory that isn't available, it turns off interrupts
and goes away.  This of course, may be a feature of the version of
CCP/M that I was using.  Also, I was using the Engr. Dept. release of
6-July-1983.  I don't know what that corresponds to in a retail
version, but I do know that it was significantly improved (!!!) over
the version that was available at the time of the product's
announcement.

The CP/M-68K compiler was done by an outside company.  It does have a
few bugs.  My favorite was the lack of flagging of an error when you
set up a data structure that doesn't sit on a longword boundary.  Got
bit by that several times.  All in all, I would say that it is a
fairly good compiler.  The code generation is not bad, and the error
messages are reasonable.  Having the four phases patched together by
an external SUBMIT file, though, is something of a drag. Sigh.

Cheers,
Tony ;-)