Subj : Open Watcom compiler
To   : Sarah Nunez
From : David Noon
Date : Sun Jul 21 2002 07:39 pm

Hi Sarah,

Replying to a message of Sarah Nunez to David Noon:

 SN> Well, none of the ide*.cfg files are in the Win16 IDE zip files.  That
 SN> seems to be the key that I'm missing.

It sure seems to be the basic problem.

 DN>> So, you should have a fairly substantial BINP directory, a smallish
 DN>> BINW directory and little or no BINNT directory.

 SN> I have exactly two files in the BINW directory:  wcl.exe and
 SN> wcl386.exe.  Those are the only ones that came on the zip files for
 SN> OS/2 host and all targets that are designated for that directory.

Ok. I'll zip up the configuration files from my BINW directory and e-mail them 
to you.

 SN> Well, my Warp CDs just got buried the other day by a mountain of
 SN> boxes.

Well, George said he couldn't find it, so you perhaps need WSeB or later. 
[George, did you check the BonusPak CD too?]

 DN>> It is getting there. Object methods are even more fragmented than
 DN>> conventional (i.e. FORTRAN-style) modular programming.

 SN> Perhaps I'll have a better understanding once I get to the C++
 SN> tutorial.

It is quite simple: in FORTRAN and all "procedural" languages, subroutines and 
functions are either wholly public or wholly private. In OO languages, a method 

is owned by a class of data, so for most method calls you need an instance of 
that class in order to call the method. This means that if two or more classes 
need to have the same functionality you end up coding the same stuff twice or 
more. Well, not really. You end up coding methods for each class, each of which 

calls some other, abstracted function that implements the common parts. This 
means that one FORTRAN subroutine can become a multitude of much smaller C++ 
methods.

There are ways to ameliorate this to some extent, but they often make the 
design seem more complicated.

 DN>> Start at http://www.wxwindows.org/ and choose whichever
 DN>> implementations you need: OS/2, Win32, X11 (LINUX and *BSD), MacOS,
 DN>> whatever.

 SN> The only OS/2 downloads I found are via CSV, which I'm still trying to
 SN> make sense of.

Ah. I have am IBM-written PDF document somewhere that is a tutorial on CSV. I 
shall include it in the e-mail with the Watcom configuration files. Do you have 

Acrobat or GSView? If neither I suggest you find a copy of Acrobat/2, as most 
of IBM's newer doco is distributed in PDF format.

 SN> I wish I could just ftp what I need and be done with it.

I have been considering building a Watcom-hosted implementation of wxOS2 and 
uploading it to Hobbes, perhaps sending it down the OS/2 filebone as well. 
Since both you and Mike Luther have expressed interest (and I expect there are 
some interested lurkers, too) this could be something useful for me to do in 
the next few weeks. Watch this space.

Regards

Dave
<Team PL/I>

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