🚀 go-pugleaf

chudley@canon.co.uk (Martin Chudley) <1992Aug26.093356.6125@canon.co.uk> writes:
>
>Apologies for this, it shouldn't be necessary but the PLM manual isn't very
>helpful on this subject.

How true.

>All I want to do is pass a string to a procedure. At present I'm
>using the dot operator to pass a string constant in the function call
>and a based variable to access it inside the procedure, and I get
>garbage. Can anyone send a few lines of code showing how to do this -

When I call the procedure, I use the "@" operator to find the address
of the strings; and use the bizzare construct below to zero-terminate
the string.

	call showstring(@('High Voltage Power Supply Failed.',0));

In the procedure being declared, I use something like:

    showstring: procedure (s_base) reentrant public;
        declare s_base				pointer;
        declare s based s_base (1)			byte;
        /* the array s seems to contain the string */
    end showstring;

This is using an old version of Intel's compiler.
    DOS 3.30 (038-N) PL/M-86 COMPILER V2.7
    Copyright Intel Corporation 1980, 1984, 1985
Does anyone know if PL/M compiler technology advanced somewhere within
the past 8 years?  Would anyone know if upgrading has any benifits
(better optimizer, something like libc.a(1/2:-), fewer bugs, fewer
compiler limits (size of strucure, etc))?


>maybe I should just fork out for something sensible like a C
>compiler.

Yeah, me too.  Unless you have a huge codebase of existing PL/M code
which needs to be maintained, I'd _strongly_ recommend switching to C
(or c++, fortran, lisp, forth, teco, assembly language, or anything
but PL/M (1/2 :-)).


Also, on a similar subject, has anyone had any experience with any of
these things, could you let me know your opinions of them:

    The plm front end for GCC supposedly being developed by someone at
    the "Technical Research Centre of Finland, Laboratory for
    Information Processing (VTT/TIK)"

    The PL/M-86 to C converter by
    "Micro-Processor Services, Inc.; (516) 499 4461"


    Ron Mayer
    mayer@acuson.com