I don't know if they ever fixed their compiler for the Amiga, but my Aztec C compiler for MSDOS had scope bugs. When inside a function and confronted with two variables of the same name, the compiler would always pick the variable OUTSIDE the scope of the function!! Stopped using it after I found that bug in favor of Lattice/Microsoft C. Douglas Wood

On 5/31/07, Chris M <chrism3667 at yahoo.com> wrote: A friend of mine who worked at Fort Monmouth and USL worked on the port -- IIRC. I think Virginia Tech was a customer. Too bad the port never got the marketing it deserved. SVR4 with the Amiga graphics could've been a slick video editing system. Bill -- -- d|i|g|i|t|a|l had it THEN. Don't you wish you could still buy it now! pechter-at-gmail.com

On 5/31/07, Alexandre Souza <alexandre-listas at e-secure.com.br> wrote: I've wanted to play with Amix, but just haven't had the time to load it - I do have plenty of spare SCSI drives, and at least one A3000/25 with a full boat of onboard RAM and an A2065, but, to be honest, when Amix was fresh, I was using AmigaDOS every day, didn't have a spare machine, didn't have (still don't have) better graphics than the onboard ECS chips, and was already running UNIX on other hardware that wasn't as slick as the Amiga. So... in my book, Amix wasn't a terrible idea, but it just never seemed like a slam-dunk for me personally. Don't get me wrong; I love UNIX, and have been using and adminstrating and developing on it for 23 years (starting with 4BSD and SysV on a VAX-11/750). I just think the Amiga can do a lot more interesting stuff under its native OS, and there's *plenty* of platforms out there for which UNIX _is_ the best choice. -ethan

[...] [...] The same probably could have been said about the Commodore 900, though. -- ------------------------------------ personal: http://www.cameronkaiser.com/ -- Cameron Kaiser * Floodgap Systems * www.floodgap.com * ckaiser at floodgap.com -- And now for something completely different. -- Monty Python ----------------

On 6/1/07, Bryan Pope <bpope at wordstock.com> wrote: My favorite phrase of the day was "if Commodore were to market sushi, they'd call it cold, raw, dead fish." -ethan

On 6/1/07, John Foust <jfoust at threedee.com> wrote: I heard it over and over again back in the day... "Graphics? That's for games. We have 80 column text!" "Color? Who needs color for spreadsheets?" "Sound? Who needs sound for business apps?" "Video? Who needs video at work?" "Networking? We can move files on floppies." "Multitasking? Nobody needs that on a personal computer." "Mice? They look silly and get in the way of the keyboard." and on and on and on... Of course, once the PC Crowd latches onto one of those technologies, it's the "greatest thing evar". Doesn't matter that you had it 5+ years before and they didn't care. -ethan

At 02:43 PM 6/1/2007, Chuck Guzis wrote: Or another way of putting it, the PGA was introduced in '84 for the low price of $4290, the Amiga came out in '85 for $1300, and PGA went dodo in '87 when VGA arrived. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Professional_Graphics_Controller If you could get an extra mortgage, you could've bought an SGI, too. - John

Ethan Dicks wrote: The PC still don't have PORN icons I remember seeing on the AMIGA ... Click on the scanty cad girl icon and ... The PC games sold a I think helped a lot of PC's sales like M$ flight-simulator for use after work even when the PC still had CGA. The reverse can't be said for the game console style marketing. Was it the Amiga 2000 that tried to give to the best ... err worst of both worlds?

On 6/1/07, Richard <legalize at xmission.com> wrote: That's true. I shouldn't have lumped networking into that list. My only excuse was that I was into networking Amigas long before most other users cared about it. I remember debating with the comp.sys.amiga.networking crowd as to the desirability of SANA (Standard Amiga Network Architecture) drivers for 3rd-party non-ethernet networking hardware, long past the point that it should have been a no-brainer. The "problem" was that AmigaOS didn't come with TCP/IP, so most users didn't care if your network widget talked SANA or not - it didn't _have_ to interoperate to be useful, and some of the more vocal users (luddites) decried the complexity of SANA and the associated network stacks. At the same time in the DOS world, all networking was add-on, and the Mac had out-of-the-box networking, but it was a closed network standard (Mac to Mac only). TCP/IP took a while to trickle down from Workstations to Micros. -ethan

Richard wrote: Although chronologically they're pretty close, I'd say it was the opening of the internet to general public access circa 1989/90 that pushed such adoption (the final battle in the protocol wars). At that point TCP/IP became mandatory to connect to the "information highway" (remember that quaint phrase?), any system that didn't provide TCP/IP wasn't going to receive much attention, and all those competing/proprietary protocols (DECNET,SNA,OSI,etc.) became superfluous (specialised capabilities notwithstanding).

At 02:50 PM 6/1/2007, Ethan Dicks wrote: Aww, I thought I'd get the blame for putting networking on that list. Yes, networking wasn't that common on PCs back then, either. My Amiga business partners thought a DECnet for Amiga would be real popular. We ported it. It wasn't. Not even paired with Dale Luck's X Window to turn the Amiga into an X term. Sometimes the ideas are in the wind - yes, Mac had Hypercard, but tagged text file help file / doc file systems were in place on the Amiga, too, predating HTML. - John

John Foust wrote: I don't think there's anything wrong with that belief though - it's just a shame that marketing will generally win over a more robust and well-designed product. As a species, I suspect we deserve what we get :-)

Believe me!! I WISH that my Aztec C woes had been caused by something I did!! It would have made finding this bug a lot easier, and saved a LOT of development time. (Well, OK, it was partially my fault for using two variables with the same name but with different scopes, I suppose.) After switching to Microsoft's C (v5.1, IIRC) the same code base hit their huge pointer bug!! Can't win for losing. :^) Douglas Wood

In article <962226.43795.qm at web61013.mail.yahoo.com>, Chris M <chrism3667 at yahoo.com> writes: K&R C allows hiding a variable at an outer scope by declaring a variable of the same name at an inner scope. Its still not a good idea, but perfectly legal in C. Hell, your average line noise puke is legal in C; or was it TECO? ;-) -- "The Direct3D Graphics Pipeline" -- DirectX 9 draft available for download <http://www.xmission.com/~legalize/book/download/index.html> Legalize Adulthood! <http://blogs.xmission.com/legalize/>

I'd expect that to evaluate to a[1]=2 and n winds up being 3. But I'm weird. -- ------------------------------------ personal: http://www.cameronkaiser.com/ -- Cameron Kaiser * Floodgap Systems * www.floodgap.com * ckaiser at floodgap.com -- If I wanted your opinion, I'd have beaten it out of you. -------------------

Cameron Kaiser wrote: But how larger is your program overhead with modern C compilers? PS. It will not complle under C "main(){ ... }" is needed at least.

This simple code snippet invokes "undefined behaviour" because: 'N' is modified twice within a single sequence block. 'N' is referenced within a sequence block separately from a modification occuring within the same sequence block. One might expect: N = 1 Save address of A[1] ++N (address of A[1]) = 2 ++N Which gives you the result you expected, however a compiler is free to perform the side effects occuring within a sequence block at any time it wishes, as long as it observes the charactistics of the operator causing the side effect. (ie: one instance of N++ cannot increment N before retrieving it's value, although the other instance of N++ could have incremented it). N = 1 A[1] = 1 N += 2 A[1] = 1, N = 3 N = 1; ++N (the second one) A[2] = 1 (saved from above ++N) ++N (the first one) A[2] = 1, N = 3 N = 1 Set temp to replace N to N+1 A[1] = 1 Set temp to replace N to N+1 N = temp to replace N A[1] = 1, N = 2 You get the idea - run the above sequence without violating the terms I mentioned at the beginning (ie: use separate variables) and the same answer occurs in all cases. Btw, technically, according to the standard, the compiler is free to say: N = 1 Humm... undefined behaviour... A[500] = 9999 N = -1 Although I've never seen an implementation which actually does this - usually you can fine some logical reason for the results. Dave -- dave06a (at) Dave Dunfield dunfield (dot) Firmware development services & tools: www.dunfield.com com Collector of vintage computing equipment: http://www.classiccmp.org/dunfield/index.html

I think nasal demons would be more like // ...Hmm, undefined behaviour... while (1) { kill(N,A[-N]); N++; } /~\ The ASCII der Mouse \ / Ribbon Campaign X Against HTML mouse at rodents.montreal.qc.ca / \ Email! 7D C8 61 52 5D E7 2D 39 4E F1 31 3E E8 B3 27 4B

On Sun, 3 Jun 2007, davis wrote: Post incs not happening until after th ';' would be a reasonable way to implement it. BUT, K&R did not specify that. The post incs can be done any time after the value of N is fetched for evaluation until after the ';'. That is left as a decision for the compiler author to do in whatever way they want to implement it. Also, should we assume that N will be incremented twice?

On 3 Jun 2007 at 15:02, davis wrote: In Sroustrup, x++ is stated to be evaluated as: t = x; x += 1; t; where t signifies a temporary. In other words, the ++ increment is performed at its occurrence within the statement, not after the remainder of the statement has been evaluated. So, in n=1; a[n++] = n++; all we know is that n will be incremented to 2 then to 3. But which side of the assignment gets incremented first? That's unspecified. A similar conundrum is: int f( int, int, int); n=1; f(++n, ++n, ++n); What gets passed to f? Why? Cheers, Chuck

At 09:55 PM 6/3/2007, Sean Conner wrote: When did list this turn into comp.lang.c? Sorry, that's not correct. Take this program: #include <stdlib.h> #include <stdio.h> void f(int a, int b, int c) { printf("%d %d %d\n", a, b, c); } main (int argc, char * argv[]) { int n = 1; f(++n, ++n, ++n); exit (0); } I compiled it using gcc. What comes out? 4 4 4 That's completely consistent with the standard. Any set of three numbers from 1 to 4 is arguably correct. The only thing that's guaranteed by "f(++n,++n,++n)" is that after the ";" n is incremented by 3. -Rick

If we're talking about C (which I thought we were), Stroustrup is not authoritative. The description you give is a reasonable working approximation, but is inexact; the way it places the increment at a specific time is one of the ways it is inexact. Yes, if that were how ++ were defined, that would be how it would be done. But it's not. Anything or nothing - it is possible that f is not even called. Why? Because there is no sequence point between the evaluation of different arguments, so n is being incremented more than once without an intervening sequence point. This places it in "undefined behaviour" territory; the result may be anything whatsoever that the compiler is capable of arranging for. /~\ The ASCII der Mouse \ / Ribbon Campaign X Against HTML mouse at rodents.montreal.qc.ca / \ Email! 7D C8 61 52 5D E7 2D 39 4E F1 31 3E E8 B3 27 4B

Chuck Guzis wrote: The whole point of C was (is?) to be fast. So in certain areas the compiler writer is given a certain latitude to do whatever turns out to be "best" for the compiler. So the standard writers aren't being particularly capricious, they are deliberately avoiding tying down the compiler writers with red tape. Whether this is a good idea or not is a different area altogether. (And one that has been decided by historical precedent). Antonio

On 31 May 2007 at 16:24, Fred Cisin wrote: Back in the old Usenet days, dmr used to pose little conundrums in C on comp.lang.c (e.g. "What does this do?). Many of the answers took the form "I don't know". The net (but not the web) was a much nicer place back then; while there were knock-down drag-out discussions, they were always pretty polite. Cheers, Chuck

On 1 Jun 2007 at 11:13, Richard wrote: Or, in my case, in 1982. But "trolls" weren't nearly as common then as they are today. Cheers, Chuck

At 02:25 PM 6/1/2007, Richard wrote: You mean this theory? http://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2004/03/19 - John

Mike Loewen wrote: All this is true, however back then you couldn't be a complete moron and yet still have the tech skills to get online to have these discussions. So while the debates were heated, you were generally talking to non-idiots just due to the nature of the discussion medium. That's mostly what I miss from the early to mid-1980s era of computing. The ratio of stone cold idiots online is orders of magnitude higher today than it was back then. -- Jim Leonard (trixter at oldskool.org) http://www.oldskool.org/ Help our electronic games project: http://www.mobygames.com/ Or check out some trippy MindCandy at http://www.mindcandydvd.com/ A child borne of the home computer wars: http://trixter.wordpress.com/

On 6/1/07, Richard <legalize at xmission.com> wrote: Out of a cannon, hopefully. Unfortunately, I've seen my share of messes caused by tricks similar to this. -ethan

Dear friends I'm working into some 68301 (68000 for embbedded applications) old-equipment stuff. I'm completely lost into everything, I cannot even decompile/simulate the code on PC. Maybe some good and candid soul would lend a hand at least to get me started? I need only to do a very small mod into the program, but first need to understand how it works. Thanks a lot! Alexandre

On 6/1/07, Gooijen, Henk <henk.gooijen at oce.com> wrote: MAME and MESS have 68000 engines, but you are on your own for building up enough virtual I/O to be able to communicate with your code. You could always extract the CPU engine from the codebase and tack on some sort of ICE-like interface. Don't know of any out-of-the-box generic 68K emulators for PCs. If I had to test-run 68000 code, I'd consider a Palm emulator, or an Amiga emulator or a Classic Mac emulator - whatever environment seemed to make the most sense. If I had a serious bit of code hacking to do, I'd consider doing it on a real Amiga, since I have lots and lots of experience on it. YMMV. -ethan

On 1 Jun 2007 at 16:53, Alexandre Souza wrote: One of the best tools that I know of to do this is IDA Pro. It'll graph and allow you to step and debug 68K code, in addition to disassembling it. The drawback is that it's expensive--about USD$500 for a single license. For a one-off, it's probably not worth the cost, but if you do this kind of thing for a living, it pays for itself very quickly. Cheers, Chuck

In article <BAY138-F1806C9BD8AEE96EB059E48A3230 at phx.gbl>, "dwight elvey" <dkelvey at hotmail.com> writes: Your question answers itself. Even *you* don't know what was intended. -- "The Direct3D Graphics Pipeline" -- DirectX 9 draft available for download <http://www.xmission.com/~legalize/book/download/index.html> Legalize Adulthood! <http://blogs.xmission.com/legalize/>

And I came up with a completely different interpretation than Dwight, so ... -- ------------------------------------ personal: http://www.cameronkaiser.com/ -- Cameron Kaiser * Floodgap Systems * www.floodgap.com * ckaiser at floodgap.com -- Immigration is the sincerest form of flattery. -- Jack Paar ----------------

On 5/31/07, Bryan Pope <bpope at wordstock.com> wrote: The Manx (Aztec C) folks were local in Shrewsbury or Eatontown, NJ.. My wife actually worked there for a while... Bill Bill -- -- d|i|g|i|t|a|l had it THEN. Don't you wish you could still buy it now! pechter-at-gmail.com

On 31 May 2007 at 11:24, Fred Cisin wrote: " a 2's complement negative numbe" :-) Cheers, Chuck

On Thu, 31 May 2007, Ethan Dicks wrote: I don't actually think the C standard specifies a behavior for this. I can also tell you that even nowadays AIX will cheerfully permit you to dereference a null pointer. Steve --

On Thu, 31 May 2007 11:24:34 -0700 (PDT), Fred Cisin wrote: ... I AM NOT asking what "should be", I'm talking about comparing what compiler authors thought. That reminds me of Metaware High-C came bundled with the FarCrap DOS extender Autodesk forced us to use back then. When we opened the box, it contained some BornAgain propoganda along with a nice letter stateing that through the power of our lord ...... we are able to provide ...... from Metaware, well you get the idea. Upon installing it and feeding it some known working MickeySoft C source, I let loose with a string of curses at the string of cryptic error messages that seemed to move never ending up my screen. My partner in crime on the project came into my cave, about that point, and asked if I had Jesus C working yet. I about lost it, I later found out I was not alone, several of the other deveolpers got their updates on teh same day. Before our version of the story got around, I soon found other developers refered to the Metaware/Farlap combination Autodesk built their developer platform around as Jesus "C" often with more colorfull stories of their own. Oh to have lived in interesting times .... Later The other Bob

On 5/31/07, Bob Bradlee <caveguy at sbcglobal.net> wrote: I am soooo lucky I wasn't in the middle of a Coke. -ethan

On 5/31/07, Chuck Guzis <cclist at sydex.com> wrote: I did a lot of programming on the Amiga, from 1986-1994, and I don't recall Mark Williams C for AmigaDOS (I do remember it for other platforms). -ethan