[Coco] VCC - Becker Module (Was: Basic09 6309 version)

[James Jones]

One important thing to remember: MS isn't concerned with keeping Visual
Studio up to date with current C standard. (C++, yes; C, no.) They've
explicitly stated that they've only implemented a few of the C99 additions
to the C standard and are unlikely to do any more. Look for C99isms in the
code.

On Mon, Jun 5, 2017 at 6:06 PM, James Ross <jrosslist at outlook.com> wrote:

> Ok… I’ve made progress w/ the Becker module issue, however, I’m not quite
> there yet.
>
> This has turned out to be one of the craziest issues I’ve ever seen on any
> project. For one thing, it has been decades since I’ve done anything in
> C/C++. It’s been since the late 90’s that I used Visual Studio 6 (VS6) and
> I have experimented w/ C/C++ briefly w/ modern versions of Visual Studio
> over the years, but nothing significant.
>
> I actually worked on this Friday, Saturday, and Sunday for ~ 12 hrs. I
> tried a slew of different combinations. I downloaded and built a good 6+
> different versions from specific commits off GitHub. I have not yet figured
> out the solution to getting the Becker module to compile and not give run
> time errors across the different versions of Visual Studio. I can get
> different versions to work, under different combinations … I could go over
> a lot of what I did, but I’m not sure I would get it all straight since I
> didn’t take good notes – but also not sure everyone (anyone?) would be
> interested in a blow by blow account of it all either – I might document
> some of it on my notes on my fork (for my own benefit)
>
> One of the issues that took a while to figure out, and then I remembered,
> is that w/ older C's you can’t declare variables in the middle of code.
> You have to declare your vars at the beginning of the method … that took a
> while.  In C mode (not C++) VS2013 would compile the Becker C code just
> fine, but VS2012 and older would not.
>
> Ideally, I would like to convert the Becker module to C++ using the extern
> “C” mechanism like the other modules use.  But the kicker is I can’t seem
> to convert to C++ w/o getting run-time errors regardless which version of
> VS I use.  And why does VS6 not like the Becker module regardless what I
> do? Plain C or C++ I get run-time errors …
>
> I’m not giving up … looking at a good week or so to figure it out.
>
> James
>
>