Overview

This is the second release of my attempt at a proper Macintosh
version of gcc conforming
to the Human Interface Guidelines. Therefore you may want to give up
at this point because it is bound to be full of bugs. However if you
are curious about how your mac works read on.

No attempt was made to make this app into a replacement for
THINK-C or MPW or any other commercial product.
Nevertheless it is possible to produce a fully functional, stand-alone
mac application from your own C source code. You may have some
example apps generated by this compiler in the same archive as you
got what you are reading. They aren't fancy, but it gives you an idea 
of what you can do, with a little effort.

This program is free software
released under the GNU Public license, hence it must
not be sold, and if distributed, you must tell anyone you pass it on to
where to get the source code. However due to the complexities some
users may not want to be bothered with the source code. You can get
the source code from the same place you got this, i.e. anonymous
ftp to nic.switch.ch or some mirror thereof.

If you like this program, send me a postcard. This will encourage
me to improve it. 
If you don't like this program, you can send me (polite!) email to
jrrk@camcon.co.uk to say why not, and you may get some help,
or just a disclaimer.
If I don't get any postcards, I will know that nobody liked the
program, and there will not be an improved version.
Many thanks to the 3 people who liked the last version out of
more than 200 downloads.

The address to send postcards is:

Jonathan Kimmitt
4 Moyne Close
Cambridge
CB4 2TA
ENGLAND

For your own protection, you should avoid
using this program for any commercial purpose. Most commercial
QA departments require that supported software be used for
developing commercial software. This software comes with no warranty.

On the other hand this program does offer some features that some
other compilers lack. The compiler diagnostic messages are, in some
cases, superior, and the programmer has the ease of use of a full
32-bit development environment, even on 68000 machines. Global
common segments are supported

This is made possible by the use of GNU development tools,
which are designed specifically for use in a 32-bit environment. The
penalty for this ease of use is that the entire program text needs to be
loaded and locked in memory at program startup, which is not
de-rigeur  as far as Inside Macintosh is concerned. However a modern
Macintosh with typically 8MB of memory and virtual capability in my
view should not be stuck with 32K segments.

This program is based on and offers similar functionality to the gcc1.37
plug-in for MPW. However various changes have been made to allow
operation in an class library environment, and to make the output format
compatible with GNU assembler (GAS). You can still see the MPW
style assembly language however, which is useful for learning about C
and 680X0 assembly language.

By now you are probably keen to see whether these claims are really true,
so select one of the other sections on the left.