From: Jerry Coffin 

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.

Yeah, that does look a bit ugly.

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

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



>  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.

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

>  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. 

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

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

Calling it a CP/M product might be an exaggeration, but they had a product
and it was ported to CP/M.  I can't imagine anybody really using it unless
they had a big RAM disk to put it on or something like that though.
         Later,
         Jerry.

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