NetNews Usenet Archive 1992 #30/NN_1992_30.iso/spool/comp/sys/mac/programm/20082

Internet Message Format | 1992-12-21 | 1.7 KB

Path: sparky!uunet!dtix!relay!relay2!afterlife!mssmith
From: [e-mail] (M. Scott Smith)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.mac.programmer
Subject: Re: Think Pascal->C conversion -- advice?
Message-ID: <[e-mail]>
Date: 19 Dec 92 15:50:27 GMT
References: <[e-mail]> <[e-mail]>
Organization: The Great Beyond
Lines: 27

Hi..  Thanks for the information on converting, Ingemar and Matt.

Ingemar: I agree with you, and think that Think C offers nominal speed
increases over Think Pascal; I am not converting the code in the interest
of speed, the Pascal version runs fast enough.  There is a legitimate
reason for converting the code to C, however.  (Otherwise I wouldn't
be wasting my time doing it!)  Inevitably, this code is being designed
to run on other platforms than the Mac, and this is just the first
(necessary) step.

I will be using prototypes..  I would rather be converting C from Pascal
as well.  In C you can easily accidentally write to all kinds of strange
memory addresses, which are very hard to debug, while Pascal protects
against that.  I just have to be very careful.

Matt: I like your idea for doing the 1-bit booleans, and I'll definitely
give that a try.  Unfortunately, it looks like I really have to be careful
about this, because this program uses a LOT of packed arrays and a lot
of memory; substituting 2-byte variables for 1-bit ones could very
well break it; and this becomes more of a problem if the code is proted
to machines that have 4-byte integers, etc.

Thanks for your help!  (Also thanks to a person who sent mail to me, of
which I forget your name now..  But you offered good advice as well.)

M. Scott Smith
  ([e-mail])