Date: Fri, 18 Oct 1996 14:31:36 +0800 (GMT)
From: Orlando Andico <orly AT gibson DOT eee DOT upd DOT edu DOT ph>
To: "T.W. Seddon" <T DOT W DOT Seddon AT ncl DOT ac DOT uk>
cc: djgpp AT delorie DOT com
Subject: Re: need advice on djgpp vs. Turbo C
In-Reply-To: <545mg6$pcn@whitbeck.ncl.ac.uk>
Message-ID: <Pine.SGI.3.93.961018142416.2934A-100000@gibson.eee.upd.edu.ph>
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII

On 17 Oct 1996, T.W. Seddon wrote:

> Christopher White (cswhite AT comp DOT uark DOT edu) wrote:
> > One thing to consider is that Borland has practically dropped all support
> > for it's DOS-based compilers.  Just visit their homepage - you'll see
> > nothing about Turbo C++ 3.0.  And I highly doubt there will be another
> > version (DOS-based) released.
> 
> I'd advise Turbo C if you're learning C/C++. I've got Turbo C++ 3.0 myself
> and it's excellent for a beginner, especially the on-line help, colouring
> of different program elements (helps a lot if you're not used to /* */!),
> the quick compilation time and the handy debugger. After programming in 
> BASIC for several years, I installed Turbo C++ and was writing a program 
> within minutes, thanks to the online help. The debugger is great, and the 
> huge pointer facility means you can ignore the 64K segment limit (640K of 
> (effectively) flat-mode memory -- pretty handy).

Given that your target machine is a 386sx with 5meg of RAM, I would
suggest that you use DJGPP v2 in combination with the JED editor. Yes, I
know Emacs is so much better and you can even run GDB from Emacs for
pseudo-IDE debugging (I don't know if this capability works under MSDOG
though). But Emacs is huge. I would not want to run Emacs + GCC on a 5meg
386sx. On my 8meg 486dx2, I _dont_ run Emacs because the size scares the
hell out of me.. :)

However, you can use JED (which has been mentioned before). It supports
syntax highlighting (them nice colors) and convenient C indenting. Of
course Emacs supports all this and more (I use XEmacs myself) but nobody
can beat JED for size/features. The DOS binary is about 800k I think and
it has an extensible language bit. You can also compile programs from JED
and it will catch the error output for you (so you can debug compile-time
errors from the editor, similar to Borland's IDE).

BTW Turbo C++ 3.0's TC.EXE binary runs about 2Meg in size, in fact it uses
a DPMI provider to get enough memory. I've used it in past, and on a 4meg
486dx2 it is kind of sluggish, so the "instant compiles" rationale doesn't
hold much water considering the speed. Another thing I hate about TC++ 3.0
is that it leaves these swap files all over the disk.. :/

I'd use DJGPP v2 if I were you.. I used DJGPP v1 (which has bigger memory
requirements than v2) on a 2meg 386sx, and while I wasn't overjoyed with
the performance, it was usable.