At no point was I asking for or expecting a recommendation of a compiler with an ide. In fact it never entered my mind. If QuickC would run lock, stock, and barrel on a Northstar Dimension I wouldn't be asking for anything. I did say the compiler couldn't rely on typical IBM PC facilities to talk to the screen. Then you brought up disk (file) i/o, which was a perfectly valid point, and I said so. So in the final analysis I guess I'll be writing w hatever on a "real" pc. Sorry for wasting the list's time. What I wanted may not exist.
Were you referring to the Poppy? How did programs talk to the disk drive? On Tuesday, December 27, 2022, 01:04:00 AM EST, Chuck Guzis via cctalk <cctalk@classiccmp.org> wrote: On 12/26/22 21:23, Chris via cctalk wrote: > I'm not conflating anything. Most of the time screen i/o is accomplished >using bios calls. That's with ms-dos/pc-dos software (whatever the percentage >of the time). But it's feally irrelevant if it's dos compatible or not, as any >code can make use of the bios subroutines. That's an immediate show stopper if >you can't get feedback from the compiler. Please no references to early time >sharing Sure you are. Lattice had no IDE; it was strictly command-line driven--if the input required a text editor, it was up to you to furnish one. If the MSDOS hosting system used a BIOS, fine. But not all did. Consider the MSDOS platforms that interfaced to a simple serial terminal. In any case, console and file I/O is done via the DOS API. How DOS does things is no concern of the compiler. This is the way before fancy screen I/O that we did things. Before that, it was with punched cards. --Chuck
