> I can add that I think VMark rewrote Prime Information in C which really > boosted the performance. I think they called it Prime Info or something >like that.
I'm not sure about this. As far as I know, once VMark took ownership of Prime Information, they gently retired it. Are you thinking of PI/open? If so, I was one of the technical managers for its development. PI/open started life in Prime Australia where the intention was to write it using a macro assembler called K9. Shortly after they got started, Prime Australia was closed and development moved to the UK. I took a look at K9 and decided that it was the wrong way to go as it made assumptions about the underlying processor architecture that were not necessarily valid if we wanted portability without massive rewriting efforts. I made a decision that the core of PI/open would be written in C. This was highly contentious. I can recall a project meeting in which the VP of Engineering stated that my continued employment was dependent on this being successful. At the time, Prime's C compiler was not good and there was much doubt about whether it would produce good code. One of my team was tasked with finding a good C compiler. He took the interesting approach of constructing a very devious program that used all manner of C operations to construct and display the ubiquitous "Hello World" string. Comparison of the resulting object code from a variety of compilers showed that some were not that good whereas one of them evaluated the entire process within the compiler and just generated a print of the literal string. A few performance critical bits of PI/open were still written in assembler but I put a rule in place that there must be a C equivalent too. It is interesting to note that just a few weeks before first release the marketing guys decided to change the platform on which it would be launched. If we had gone the assembler route, this would have imposed a huge delay. With C, it took just a few changes to recompile everything. Phew! I still had a job. Martin Phillips Ladybridge Systems Ltd 17b Coldstream Lane, Hardingstone, Northampton NN4 6DB, England +44 (0)1604-709200 _______________________________________________ U2-Users mailing list U2-Users@listserver.u2ug.org http://listserver.u2ug.org/mailman/listinfo/u2-users