#3


Answering msg from Paul Edwards to rowan crowe,
on Wednesday May 31 1995 at 07:30

 PE>> P.P.P.S. YIPPEE!!!!  The problem was I hadn't put in the special
 PE>> prototype (...) to force Watcom to pass parameters on the stack
 PE>> before calling the assembler version of normalize, and now she's
 PE>> a little ripper!!!

 rc>> Watcom passes by registers usually?? That's damn strange for a
 rc>> HLL. Maybe it's half decent, even.

 PE> Yes, it does.

    How do you specify which registers pass which parameters? What if you
run out of registers?

    Heaps better than stack based variables. I look at my QuickBASIC and
QuickC libs and wonder just how many "push bp / mov bp, sp"
statements there are.

 PE>> P.P.P.P.S. If you know of a way of making Watcom (DOS, not OS/2,
 PE>> and 16-bit, not 32-bit) of passing parameters on the stack instead
 PE>> of in registers let me know, as I don't like having the watcom
 PE>> specific stuff in my source code like that.

 rc>> I don't understand exactly what you're saying -- were you able
 rc>> to solve the original problem and therefore remove my
"quick fix"
 rc>> code? And, RTFM Paul, if ya have one. ;-)

 PE> No, I don't want to remove your "quick fix" code
primarily.  Primarily

    So it's still in there? I can have a peek and suggest routines which
don't need it, although it's hardly going to decrease the size of the EXE
by that much.

 PE> I want to not have to create a prototype (...) to force Watcom to
 PE> pass things on the stack, I want a compiler option.  I have RTFM but
 PE> I didn't see any option.

    Interesting, since all the other HLL compilers (QuickBASIC, QuickC,
Borland Pascal, Borland C?) I have seen use stack based variables, and that
seems to be the convention. Shouldn't register based parameters be an
*exception* rather?

 PE> Also, the discussion on "assembler" in Watcom says
"we don't teach
 PE> you assembler", so you can't find out what all the constructs usage
 PE> are!

    Even if they can't teach you assembler, it's important for them to
teach you how to interface it with their product.

 PE>   BTW, I bought the CDROM version of Watcom, which doesn't come with
 PE> printed manuals, for a cost of around $300. For that price you get
 PE> 16-bit DOS, 16-bit OS/2, 16-bit Windows, 32-bit DOS, 32-bit OS/2,
 PE> 32-bit Windows, 32-bit Windows-NT.  BFN.

    So... any plans for a 'doze version of msged ?

---