Path: utzoo!attcan!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!wasatch!cs.utexas.edu!ut-emx!walt.cc.utexas.edu!pmaniac From: pmaniac@walt.cc.utexas.edu (Noah Friedman) Newsgroups: comp.lang.c Subject: Re: Recommend a C compiler? Summary: high personal praise for Turbo C Message-ID: <17200@ut-emx.UUCP> Date: 16 Aug 89 20:28:05 GMT References: <660054@hpclwjm.HP.COM> Sender: news@ut-emx.UUCP Reply-To: pmaniac@walt.cc.utexas.edu (Noah Friedman) Organization: The University of Texas at Austin, Austin, Texas Lines: 30 In article <660054@hpclwjm.HP.COM> walter@hpclwjm.HP.COM (Walter Murray) writes: >I know C but am a total novice in the world of PC compatibles. >Which compiler should I buy for my home use? I want good quality, >a commitment to ANSI C, responsiveness in fixing bugs, and good >documentation. I expect to be doing a variety of applications, >including graphics. My personal favorite is Turbo C ( (c) Borland International). It follows the ANSI C standard, but the compiler directives can be modified so that it'll handle the more lax format of UNIX C. Also, I believe Borland makes the only compiler with an "integrated environment", which really makes it handy to debug & run programs. My only criticism of the Turbo C library are the graphics functions, however. Borland didn't include any graphics at all with the first version, but by version 1.5 included a set of routines that did all sorts of crazy things with memory allocation & so forth. I got fed up with it and wrote my own graphics library. Turbo C seems to be the fastest compiler available for the IBM, though. Documentation is fair (library functions are documented in K&R format). Succesive versions seem to have fewer bugs & optimize a bit more, and version 2.0 has an in-line source debugger. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------- pmaniac@walt.cc.utexas.edu.UUCP (Noah Friedman) Any opinions expressed in this article are entirely my own and are not representative of any official organization, including UT Austin. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------