8-bit C, was Re: Anybody ever use Aztec C for APPLEII?

From: Tom Jennings <tomj_at_wps.com>
Date: Wed Apr 28 13:39:55 2004

On Wed, 2004-04-28 at 00:54, Ethan Dicks wrote:

> I'm not as familiar with the 6809 as I am with the 6502... what differences
> in architecture make it better? Larger stack frame? More (and larger)
> registers?

The 6809, in my opinion, was the prettiest instruction set of any of the
8bit+ processors. It had two 16-bit index regs, A, B, good addressing
modes, post/pre inc/decrement, stack frame pointers or something? blah
blah blah. It's like it was designed for assembly programmers like me
who grew up on the classic mini-era machines. Too bad for me, I never
got to use it.


> > (Z80) may produce mediocre code.
>
> Is that inherent to the CPU architecture, or just a coincidence of how
> much effort people have (or have not) put into C compilers for 8-bit
> machines?

Both, I think, but also software, author and industry maturity. I used
Leor Zolman's BDS C on the 8080/8085/Z80 for years, and I used a custom
printf() up through the 90's that I derived from Leor's code!

BDS was a fantastic software package. We evaluated Whitesmith's C and
BDS; whitesmith was far more correct, but: expensive, very slow and
cumbersome (3 - 6 passes?!), very closed, snotty and difficult to deal
with them. BDS was cheap, friendly, hackable, modest, too-small
libraries, incompatible, and you could write real code, extend the
libraries easily (I added standard unix type read(), open() write() etc
instead of the default FCB type junk!) in either BDS C or M80. And you
could call him on the phone!! I woke him up once, how's that for
accessibility? I heard that he was a law student and BDS C paid for part
of his expenses...

BDS == Brain Dead Software. I do miss those days.

tomj


> The 1802 gets around a lot of the limitations of the 6502, from these
> aspects, but I don't recall seeing a C compiler for _that_ platform :-)

D'OH! :-)
Received on Wed Apr 28 2004 - 13:39:55 BST