C compiler for Prime 750?

[arnold at psuvax.UUCP]

At the Prime Users Group national conference (June 19-23 at the San
Francisco Hilton), Prime announced the imminent availability of Garth
Conboy's C compiler.  (Garth's own company, Primarily Software, changed
its name to Pacer Software at the insistance of Prime recently.)  The
compiler will be marketed and supported as a regular Prime product.
The following notes are abstracted from the handout distributed at the
announcement session.

  o  not a pcc implementation, requires no Bell license
  o  2-pass, with excellent syntactical error recovery
  o  code-generation pass can be disabled for checkout
  o  compatible with cc v.6-7 and system III
  o  comes with a system III-compatible library
  o  compiles at 5000+ lpm
  o  creates V-mode (virtual, 32-bit) code compatible with Prime's
     Fortran 66 and 77, COBAL, Pascal, and PL/I compilers
  o  interfaces with Prime's command procedure language and symbolic
        debugger
  o  supports ordinary PRIMOS files as byte-stream files (i.e., it
     makes blank-compression and trailing blank suppression transparent
     to C programs)
  o  libraries supply all system III section 2-3 routines plus many
     new routines to allow communication with the PRIMOS world

At the time of announcement, beta test versions were to be issued soon.
(The compiler is ready.  Only fancy Prime packaging, documentation, and
full debugger support is needed for final release.)  Final release should
take place later this year.

Also at the PUG meeting, the University of New Hampshire UNIX version
for Prime computers was demonstrated live.  As soon as they can figure out
how to charge folks more than $600 for it, they'll start to sell it.  This
is a UNIX port and requires a Bell license.  It runs side-by-side with
PRIMOS on top of the PRIMOS kernel.  To PRIMOS and UNIX, the other o.s.
appears as a bunch of processes, and the other file system appears as one
large unformatted file.  The file systems are incompatible, but utilities
are supplied to interconvert files.

At simultaneous exhibition of third-party products for Prime users called
COMPAT1BLES `83, much interest was expressed in UNIX-based products.
I expect that a number of products in the UNIX spirit, written in C, will
be unveilled at COMPAT1BLES `84, to be held next May in Orlando at the
same time as the 1984 PUG meeting.  Since one of my main occupations is
to watch the 3rd-party software market for Prime users, I'll keep
interested individuals (or the net, if there is sufficient interest)
posted on announcements of UNIX-type products for Prime computers.  If
this information would be useful to you, call, write, or reply by mail.

Steve Arnold
(814) 863-3877
P.O. Box 30, Lemont PA 16851 (USPS)
{allegra|burdvax}!psuvax!arnold (uucp)
S7A at PSUVM (BITNET for IBM mainframes running VM)