Jerry Coffin wrote in a message to Roy.J..Tellason!1.270.615.0{at}filegat:

 JC> From: Jerry Coffin 

 JC> At 10:06 AM 1/17/2004, you wrote:
>Jerry Coffin wrote in a message to Roy.J..Tellason!1.270.615.0{at}filegat:
>
>Looks like some aspects of the gateway still need a little work here.

 JC> Yeah, that does look a bit ugly.

> JC> From: Jerry Coffin 
>
>Yeah,  you were around back when,  weren't you?  :-)

 JC> No -- nowadays I'm a round, but back then I was much thinner.  

Weren't we all?  :-)

> JC> In Pascal compilers alone, there were things like JRT Pascal,
> JC> Pascal/S, Pascal/MT+ (which had a number of direct predecessors
> JC> itself) as well as a couple of free Pascal compilers.
>
>I seem to remember hearing about how JRT never quite worked the way it was
>supposed to...  Pournelle,  maybe?  It's been a while.

 JC> I think I'd put it a bit more simply: for any reasonable definition
 JC> of "worked", it didn't at all.

Ok.  I was just going by what I'd heard,  I never had any actual experience
with the product.  And from what I was hearing back then,  I'm not sure I
wanted to.

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

 JC> Yes.  Interestingly enough, Leor Zolman is still around, still
 JC> doing things.  Lately, he's been working on a (free) tool to decode
 JC> the insane error messages you can get from a C++ compiler when you
 JC> use templates. It does pretty well at that.

I'd heard his name fairly recently,  maybe within the past year or so,  but
didn't recall anything about what he was doing.

>  And I didn't know that Whitesmith's had a CP/M product out at all.

 JC> Calling it a CP/M product might be an exaggeration, but they had a
 JC> product and it was ported to CP/M.

Ok.

 JC> I can't imagine anybody really using it unless they had a big RAM 
 JC> disk to put it on or something like that though.

Speaking of which,  My Osborne Executive has a rather unusual physical
setup in that ram is on a separate little board in there.  I've got a blank
board that somebody sent me that boosts the factory setup of 128k up to
either 512k or a meg,  depending on what you stick in there,  and have
never gotten around to stuffing it and putting it in there.  Applications
for that included print buffer and,  "a really big ram disk". 
:-)  Maybe one of these days I'll get to it.

---