Re: GNO...

[Rob Greene <greener@charter.net>]

"mdj" <mdj.mdj@gmail.com> wrote in
1169554774.764325.162740@k78g2000cwa.googlegroups.com:">news:1169554774.764325.162740@k78g2000cwa.googlegroups.com: 

>> 1. Do the Merlin tools work from the command line?  How?  I see how
>> to get MD Basic working.  Is there any way to run a BASIC program
>> from from GNO?
> 
> You have to have ORCA/C I'm afraid...
> 
> One interesting alternative would be to see if (or modify) the cc65
> cross compiler to compile itself. If you can do that, then combined
> with an OMF linker (which you'd have to write) you'd then have an open
> solution to the problem. Now, I'm not suggesting cc65 will compile
> itself, but it did once run on the Atari ST so the machine size it was
> designed for is at least similar.

I was actually pondering LCC since it compiles to 65816.  Not sure I 
really want to go there.  And $40 for the C compiler (or $100 for the big 
kahuna) isn't quite where I want to go since I'm simply tinkering.  Not 
to mention a cheap-skate!  Not cuts intended... ;-)

Especially when I can do most of the development off line and just 
download the result.  Or by jumping between other GS/OS applications (ie, 
Merlin or NinjaForce for assembly and possibly MD Basic for the rest...).

>> 2. What are the real memory requirements?  I'm currently sitting at
>> 1.25MB and I think I'm at the edge.  I tried "awk -?", but it never
>> printed an error or came back, so I have a hunch I went over... man
>> pages don't work... anything that seems to have any memory needs seem
>> to fail. 
> 
> That's probably an inconclusive test - awk interpreters don't
> typically accept such an option and the GNO implementation might be
> expecting a script in stdin.

True enough, I'm just guessing from a symptom.

>> 5. Anything interesting going on with GNO?  Or is it pretty much
>> dead? 
> 
> The lack of an available compiler is the big issue, since it prevents
> easily porting of applications. The other problem is that a large
> volume of available C code will incorrectly assume that int == 32 bits
> and also (even worse) assume sizeof(int) == sizeof(int*). On a 65816
> both of those are untrue so a lot of massaging will be necessary to
> get things running.