Mail Archives: djgpp/2001/06/28/11:45:10
On Tue, 26 Jun 2001 23:05:45 +0100, Mark McIntyre
<mark AT garthorn DOT demon DOT co DOT uk> sat on a tribble, which squeaked:
>On Tue, 26 Jun 2001 01:42:23 GMT, invalid AT erehwon DOT invalid (Graaagh the
>Mighty) wrote:
>
>>>Note that you are asking questions about compiler implementation internals that
>>>are off topic in comp.lang.c.
>>
>>I fail to see how that is relevant in comp.os.msdos.djgpp.
>
>because this was crossposted to many groups. So he gets an answer
>relevant to that group. Its always worth reading the group list.
The group list, as displayed by Free Agent, was "comp.os.msdos.djgpp".
(It appears in the window title when an article is being viewed. The
title changes to the subject line when writing an article.)
Don't, by the way, suggest I use another news reader. The alternatives
make my skin crawl. One comes from Microsoft. Netscape's regularly
hangs the OS. The only remaining free ones for Windoze I am aware of
are crummy ports of Unix ones, and get the worst of both worlds, as
they use the crappy Windoze interface but don't stick to its standards
and you need a degree in rocket science and advanced linear algebra in
order to so much as configure them to talk to your ISP's news server,
let alone actually subscribe a group and read 1 article from it.
(DJGPP, fortunately, doesn't get "the worst of both worlds", although
RSXNTDJ did during its heyday. It is no more rocket science than any
other C compiler out there -- arguably the snazzy commercial ones are
worse for that because they hide some of the process and then fail in
obscure ways you don't know how to fix, and then you don't have a
newsgroup for support, you have their hugely expensive "toll-free"
number. And it doesn't pretend to be a Windoze program, nor does it
need a GUI to be used effectively. Unlike, say, your editor, or your
newsreader, where you want to have multiple windows open at once and
to be able to navigate visually rather than by the usual process of
"hit the eight bucky keys and the other key, frantically escape out of
the unfamiliar prompt, go to the help file, try to read it, try to get
out of the help browser, fail, try to find the section of the help
file about exiting the help browser, hit the eight bucky keys and the
other key...")
>The result of the COMPILATION is some translated text which may be an
>object module, or may be a hippo. ISO doesn't define that.
If so, they made a rather large oversight, since that means I can call
my program that occasionally reboots the machine and otherwise
generates pretty Mandelbrot fractals "an ANSI C Compiler" and nobody
can prove me wrong... All I have to do is make it able to read a
source file, and proceed to generate a Mandelbrot fractal (or,
perhaps, reboot the machine)...
>The result of your PROGRAM is the output. As a C programmer you should
>care about the latter, not the former.
The result of that includes its speed of execution and its memory
requirements, and that gets to the heart of the matter the original
poster was questioning.
>(In CLC, the result of a program is pretty much defined by ISO as
>being the output. Who cares what the compiler produces ? thats
>implementation specific stuff.)
Well, if the compiler doesn't actually produce object code that runs
as the program on the CPU involved, I'd become a tad concerned.
>Could be, but ANSI/ISO don't care and nor should the OP.
I hate to burst your theoretical bubble, but programmers can and will
care about the code speed and memory requirements, and this isn't even
wrong. Why, otherwise, do they make *optimizers*?
--
Bill Gates: "No computer will ever need more than 640K of RAM." -- 1980
"There's nobody getting rich writing software that I know of." -- 1980
"This antitrust thing will blow over." -- 1998
Combine neo, an underscore, and one thousand sixty-one to make my hotmail addy.
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