Date   : Tue, 01 May 1984 19:08:05 CDT
From   : vomlehn <vomlehn@...>
Subject: Aztec CII version 1.06 released

I got version 1.06 of Aztec CII for CP/M-80 recently and finally got
it installed.  There are some unexpected things on the release disk.
First, there is no source library.  I don't mind this since I am paying
Manx to fix the thing; I don't want to spend any time on it myself.
Second, there is no separate Z-80 library, though there is a separate
Z-80 compiler.  I called the people at Manx and was told that there
is only one library.  The code appropriate to the processor you want is
automatically selected.  I didn't remember to ask at what level this was
done, so I don't know if it is determined by how you compiled the main
program, a minimization of processor across all of the compiled files
(i.e., if you compile any routine with the 8080 compiler it uses the 8080
library routines) or whether it figures out which type of processor is running
the linker and links in the routines for that processor.  Third, all of
the #include files (i.e., the ones ending in .h) are in an archive file.
There is a program which you run (called arcv.com or something like that)
to extract them.  The archive file is the only file whose name with .arc
on the disk.

Impressions:  They have added MANY more routines to the library.  Such
useful goodies as setjmp/longjmp, qsort (for a quicksort routine),
execl/exec (runs a new program with the given name), memory allocation
routines that allow you to free storage as well as allocating it and
many more.  All the bugs I know of were fixed, including the most annoying
feature it had of flushing the disk buffer each time it wrote a character
to sdtout when it was redirected to a disk file.  This means that

prog >prog.out

doesn't take forever to work.  The manual was rewritten and is much improved.
They adopted the UNIX style of manual pages, which is much better than the
rather haphazard way they were doing things.  The code generated is somewhat
smaller, but not very much and the compiler, assembler and linker run only
slightly faster.  I wish that the Manx people knew enough about code generation
and optimization to produce really good code, but that is a problem shared
with most C compilers.  Excluding that wish, the new C is much improved.  If
you didn't know whether you should get the update service, do, the new version
is worth it.  As you would hope, my only association with Manx Software is
that I use their product.

David M. VomLehn
ARPA:    vomlehn@...
USERNET: ...decvax!ihnp4!ut-ngp!vomlehn
