HunnyBon

TV entity, MtF, Programmer, Writer

Maddie Cylinder Watch Her Rotate

Fluent in Go, C#/Java, Python, lua...


jckarter
@jckarter

This book I got in a pile of FM TOWNS books turns out to be a lot more interesting that I was expecting an '80s C compiler manual to be. For as long as C and its relatives have been in mainstream use, it has been necessary to use vendor language extensions to actually get anything done with it, though in today's GCC/Clang/MSVC oligopoly those extensions tend to be focused on the yak-shaving details of dealing with the underlying platform. Things were much more interesting in the 80s, when there were a lot more, smaller companies competing for adoption. Phar Lap wrote one of the first DOS extenders that allowed programs to take full advantage of the 32-bit 80386 processor from the otherwise 16-bit-bound MS-DOS environment, and they hired MetaWare to port their High C Compiler to their SDK.

Fujitsu in turn chose Phar Lap's DOS extender to integrate into the OS for their 80386-based FM TOWNS platform, and High C became the first-party C compiler for the platform. The FM TOWNS came out in 1989, just barely in time for the first ANSI C standard C89 to be ratified. High C has its share of DOS-specific extensions, but it also contains a lot of interesting user-oriented language extensions I haven't seen in other C compilers I've used, ranging from small quality of life improvements to fairly advanced features you wouldn't think would be possible in C, let alone a late-80s dialect of C! Some of these things would take literal decades to make it into some official standard of C or C++, and some of them still don't have equivalents in either language today. Here are some of the extensions I found interesting:


HunnyBon
@HunnyBon

If there's nothing else to take away from this amazing write up, please at the very least enjoy the goober on the front


You must log in to comment.

in reply to @jckarter's post:

I really agree! That remains my favorite part of that language.

It's cool that you are the designer for Swift! I haven't been a Mac dev for years now, but I was thinking just last week that maybe I should try out Swift just to see what the latest and greatest is