NetNews Usenet Archive 1992 #18/NN_1992_18.iso/spool/comp/lang/c/12355

Text File | 1992-08-14 | 1.9 KB | 52 lines

Newsgroups: comp.lang.c
Path: sparky!uunet!uunet.ca!canrem!telly!druid!darcy
From: [e-mail] (D'Arcy J.M. Cain)
Subject: Re: Macros for ANSI prototypes
Message-ID: <[e-mail]>
Date: Fri, 14 Aug 1992 19:40:33 GMT
References: <[e-mail]> <[e-mail]>
Organization: D'Arcy Cain Consulting
Lines: 41

[e-mail] (Robert Osborne) writes:
>[e-mail] (Dave Schaumann) writes:
>> In stead of obfuscating your code with macros that turn on and off
>> functio prototypes as the particular compiler requires, wouldn't it be
>> better to simply include one of the tools freely available to
>> automatically massage prototyped code into K&R acceptability.
>
>What if the code needs to be compiled simultaneously on eight
>architecutures; 4 K&R and 4 ANSI?

You may misunderstand what Dave (from *my* understanding) is saying.  Just
because you have an ANSI --> K&R converter doesn't mean that you throw
away the ANSI code.  The K&R code just becomes one of the stages of the
compilation.  For example, a standard compile might be:

    ANSI C --> Assembler --> a.out

but for another system it becomes:

    ANSI C --> K&R C --> Assembler --> a.out

You see the K&R is simply an intermediate stage and is thrown out after
along with the .s and .o files.  How you do this of course is a matter
for you to set up in your own environment.  As an example, I have hacked
Gnu C to allow me to make Minix programs on my ANSI development system.
The flow is:

    ANSI C (.c) --> K&R C (.m) --> Copy to Minix machine (.c) --> Compile

This is all more or less automated.

>Prototype checking is a great debugging tool;  I'd hate to lose it
>just because one of my architectures is K&R.

And there is no need to.

--
D'Arcy J.M. Cain ([e-mail])  |
D'Arcy Cain Consulting              |   There's no government
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