BDS C

[Tom Jennings]

On Sun, 8 May 2005, Brad Parker wrote:

>> I distinctly recall evaluating BDS against Whitesmith's 7-pass
>> compiler.  I don't recall the specific results, but I do remember
>> it being difficult to operate, sloooooooow, fussy, and expensive.
>> We ended up using BDS.
>
> Not really a fair comparison, imho.  but both products changed my life :-)
>
> Whitesmith's was out much earlier and did, in fact work.  It was just
> really slow on floppies.  And it was available on rt-11/rsts, which
> turned out to be really handy.
>
> BDS was fast, but not as complete.  I ended up using BDS for most
> production work.  (it was "load and go fortran" for s-100 :-)
>
> An amazing product for the time.  Much like "Think C" for macintosh.

Agreed; Whitesmiths was the "real thing" but when push came to
shove, BDS got the job done better. Unix compatibility wasn't an
issue, and BDS sure beat M80 for program development! Besides
basic std lib wasn't hard to code using the FCB file junk BSD
supported.