Re: C programming langauge on Apple II
- From: et472@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx (Michael Black)
- Date: 20 Aug 2006 20:41:43 GMT
(mores_p@xxxxxxxxxxx) writes:
Hi!,
Do they (programmers) use C programming language on Apple II? (II+, IIe
or IIc) I have the impression that most Apple II programmers normally
use either Basic (I did on my Apple II days) or Assembly. I am not sure
if it's correct.
Also, how do you rate C as a programming language on Apple II? Is it
good? I ask because i consider myself now as a C programmer and it'll
be great if i can use the language i am most skilled with to program my
Apple II.
Mark
I can't address your question in respect to the Apple, but my first
C Compiler was for OS-9 on the Radio Shack Color Computer back in 1988.
I played with it a bit, but didn't go far. With only floppy drives and
a 2MHz system clock, it was pretty slow to compile anything, which meant
I didn't play with it enough to get good. And given that 8 bit computers
could only address 64K of memory, C programs tended to be large compared
to assembly language programs. One example I remember well was a simple
program to clear the screen, a handful of bytes with assembly language but
the C program was in the thousands of bytes, because of the library.
Only this year did I really start to play with C again. In part, because
I had need of a few things and I decided it was time to learn C. One
thing that really excited me was that with a hard drive and a 1GHz clock,
compiling was a snap, basically instantaneous for the simple programs
I was trying. ON that sort of system, it was as easy to fix things
as when using a BASIC interpreter on that old Color Computer. I could
make mistakes and fix them almost immediately (admittedly not a factor
for those familiar with C). The resulting programs may still be bigger
than the equivalent assembly program, but it has a 160gig hard drive
and 256megs of RAM, so that's not really an issue, unlike the old
8 bit systems.
Another factor is ease. Most of the programming I've done was in assembly
language, actually a good portion was hand assembled, and it was on the 6502.
The instruction set was so simple, it was easy to remember the right
op-codes for the commonly used instructions. Given taht, there is less
incentive to move to a C compiler on the 6502, other issues aside. I
only felt a need to use an assembler when I moved to the CoCo, since
its 6809 CPU had a far more complicated instruction set. That gets
even worse when you move to the 16-bit CPUs, and a C compiler starts
becoming more useful at that point.
Finally, a lot of existing programs one might want to compile would
result in a program way too big for the 6502's address space. If
there aren't a lot of programs in C that you can use on the 6502,
having source level compatibility is less of a factor than today
when the same program can work on a Macintosh and on an MSDOS
machine.
Michael
.
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