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From: gvw1@ihuxp.UUCP (George V. Wilder)
Newsgroups: net.micro.cpm
Subject: Eco-C Compiler by Ecosoft, Inc
Message-ID: <887@ihuxp.UUCP>
Date: Thu, 8-Nov-84 17:38:59 EST
Article-I.D.: ihuxp.887
Posted: Thu Nov  8 17:38:59 1984
Date-Received: Sat, 10-Nov-84 03:47:41 EST
Organization: AT&T Bell Labs, Naperville, IL
Lines: 61

A couple of days ago I made a request to the net for information on the
Eco-C Compiler.  I'm posting the following response that I received.  I
find myself usually asking instead of "giving."  I hope that the following
will be of interest to the net (I have edited out the sender's name).

	George V. Wilder
-----------------------------------------------

In response to your query:

  Eco-C (ver 1.52) was reviewed in May 1984 Byte (p. 246), with
follow-ups and comments in August 1984 (p. 310) and Sept. 1984 (p. 358).
The latest version is 3.1, and is substantially improved over 1.52.

I was using BDS-C on my Z-80 machine, but wanted a standard C compiler
so I could move programs among the machines I work on (an IBM PC-XT,
a Sage, and a Vax, besides the Z-80).  I purchased Eco-C from the
Programmers Shop ($225 including Purdum's "C Programming Guide")
about a month ago, and have been satisfied with its performance.
It is slow, compared with BDS-C (but then what isn't?) or DeSmet C
on the XT, but about the same as Pascal MT+.  I suspect it would
be speeded up considerably with a hard disk or RAM disk (I have
a 4 MHz Z-80 with 2 1MB 8" disks).

The syntax of Eco-C is pure K&R - maybe a little too pure, as
it complains about spaces between names of functions not yet declared
and the opening parenthesis of the argument list.  I'm not sure
whether K&R really mean this or not (p. 186, paragraph 4, last sentence)
so I can't complain too much (I'm going to post a query to get a
consensus on net.lang.c).  But I've found no flagrant modifications
or extensions to the language.

The library is good and quite standard.  I counted 121 functions,
of which 79 were common to Eco-C and Unix C (4.2 BSD), and 67
were common to those two compilers plus DeSmet C.  A few minor
annoyances: there is no abs, fread, fwrite, fputc, realloc, or rindex
(although most of these can be supplied from other functions, such as
read or write); some functions have been given different names (e.g.
malloc is alloc, rand is irand, log is ln, log10 is log, and pow is
power) - these can be fixed with #defines.  Source for functions
written in C is available for $10 - I haven't bothered yet.

The manual is quite good - good reference section on functions,
material on assembly language interface.  You can't embed assembly
code with #asm as in DeSmet C, but it's easy to link in assembly
language functions - this is in keeping with the "keep it standard"
idea.

Overall, I am satisfied.  I do most of my development on other machines,
then transfer the source and recompile, but if you're patient,
you could do all development with Eco-C quite reasonably (I think
the relatively slow speed is to be expected for a full compiler
on a Z-80 floppy-disk machine).  I would recommend Eco-C for a
standard C compiler for CP/M.

-- 


		George V. Wilder

		         ihnp4!ihuxp!gvw1