Vitus Jensen wrote in a message to Mike Bilow:

 MB> For marketing and business reasons, Microsoft withdrew OS/2
 MB> support and development after MASM 5.1 and C 6.0.

 VJ> How comes I still use MASM 6.00B under OS/2? This is the
 VJ> last version for OS/2. 

I have serious reservations about MASM 6.0, and it is not officially
supported under OS/2 as far as IBM is concerned.  All of the OS/2 internals
which need an assembler are built using MASM 5.1, as you will see from the
DDK, with only a couple of rare exceptions.  IBM is also trying to migrate
OS/2 building to its own Assembly Language Processor (ALP), which is
included as a part of the OS/2 Warp Toolkit now.

 MB> Interestingly, both products then experienced a huge decline in
 MB> usefulness, with MASM 6.0 famous as the failed experiment in
 MB> object-oriented structured assembly language and C 7.0 famous as
 MB> the box that was too heavy to ship.

 VJ> For every person doing device driver programming for OS/2 it
 VJ> is well worth using C/C++ 7.0 for this task (adding the
 VJ> C7OS2.zip).  It optimizes better and has much less "INTERNAL
 VJ> COMPILER ERROR, please contact Microsoft".  

Actually, MS C 6.0 is a remarkably good compiler, probably the best one
ever released by Microsoft.  MS C 7.0 has basically the same code
generator, but has a lot more junk thrown in the box.

In any case, MS C 6.0 remains the 16-bit compiler officially supported by
IBM, and all of the tools and libraries in the DDK are designed to use it. 
If you are going to move away from MS C 6.0, the only reasonable option is
Watcom C++ 10.x.  Even MS C 7.0 has no support for Pentium-class
instruction scheduling, for example, which Watcom C++ 10.x does.
 
-- Mike


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