From: Jerry Coffin 

At 02:07 AM 1/15/2004, you wrote:

[ ... ]

>  PS> Then I got a PC and (because of school) got into Turbo Pascal.
>
>That was,  if I'm remembering right,  also available for CP/M boxes.  In fact
>it was one of the first higher-level languages available for the CP/M
>platform.

It was really a lot closer to being one of the _last_.  By the time it came
along, the PC was already imminent, and when it came out new languages for
CP/M became quite rare.

In Pascal compilers alone, there were things like JRT Pascal, Pascal/S,
Pascal/MT+ (which had a number of direct predecessors itself) as well as a
couple of free Pascal compilers.

On the C side, you've already noted Mix, but there was a pretty wide range
of C compilers as well, ranging from BDS C (small, fast, pretty usable) to
Whitesmiths C which was really FAR too large for CP/M at all -- it wouldn't
even fit on one disk with most systems, so you had to swap floppies a few
times to complete a single compilation...

>Yeah,  most programs didn't bother with the BIOS because it was too slow.  And
>since you wanted to write directly into video ram you had to find out what
>hardware was running (mono or CGA,  EGA and VGA came a bit later on :-) and
>where that ram was.  Programs were a lot more complicated in this respect.

Most programs were a lot more complex than they really needed to be.  In
the end, you didn't really want to check the hardware per se, but the video
mode you were going to use.  If you were in mono mode, the screen started
at 0xb800, otherwise it was at 0xb000.  The programs that tried to get
fancy and detect the hardware usually ended up screwing things up -- just
for example, an EGA or VGA can emulate a monochrome adapter, so if you
assume EGA/VGA -> 0xb000, your program can end up wrong.

>Ok.  Where else would printf show up,  under bash?  I remember seeing it
>somewhere,  in a script file I think it was,  and it was kind of a kick
>because
>I had at least some clue as to what was going on.

AWK would be one obvious possibility -- it's a rather strange language, but
can be quite handy at times.  In AWK, you have a set of patterns it
searches for, and an action to execute when a pattern is found.  The
patterns are regular expressions.  The actions are in a unique language all
their own, but it's somewhat reminiscent of C, and (in particular) does
include a printf.
         Later,
         Jerry.

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