Lattice C for IBM Mainframes from SAS

[Richard Stevens]

I talked to them on the phone and they will want $3,500 per year
for the compiler (its licensed, not sold).  It will also come with all
of the non-standard Lattice C "features" that will break all your code
(#define definitions and invocations cannot take more than one source
line, lack of unsigned chars and unsigned longs, comments that nest
by default, conversion of structure arguments to structure addresses,
abysmal support for printf and scanf, and on and on).

We've been using Lattice for over 2 years for our PC product and just
dumped it for the new Microsoft compiler (which has worked flawlessly).
We can finally get rid of all the "#ifdef LATTICE" statements !!
We don't have to deal with Lifeboat anymore either !!

We're just about to order an IBM mainframe compiler and we're going with
Whitesmiths, now that they finally provide a Version 7 run-time
library as an option.  I have a lot more faith in the Whitesmiths
compiler faithfully following K&R than what I've seen from Lattice.
Also, Whitesmiths runs under CMS, OS and DOS, while SAS has no plans
at all for DOS.  Whitesmiths is also considering CICS which SAS won't
talk about.  The people at SAS also said when I called that their ads
had been placed "prematurely" as the product is not available yet
(but you can get a beta test version for free, if you like finding
other people's bugs).  One support issue that I should mention is
that I think the Whitesmiths compiler was done out-of-house and I don't
think they have an IBM mainframe in-house, while I'd bet SAS has an
actual system in-house.

	Richard Stevens
	Health Systems International, New Haven, CT
           ihnp4 ! hsi ! stevens