Brian White writes: >Am I missing something, or shouldn't be fairly easy to port HP's C++ compiler >for Unix to MPE, now that the hierarchical file system exists under MPE/iX >5.0?? The problem is not one of "how difficult" but "how many would be sold." Having recently "de-ported" two libraries (a general-purpose lexer and a PCL parser) from C++ to C in order to use them on the HP3000, I would LOVE to have C++ on MPE iX. But for some silly reason, HP engineering insists on doing things the right way, so the port is harder than it looks. First, the ported compiler has to have the "look and feel" of any other HP3000 compiler. That means its defaults may need to be different for the two platforms; it needs to be trained to read MPE-style files (though that problem partially goes away under 5.0) and the MPE directory structure. It needs to support the same #pragma intrinsic mechanism that the C compiler supports, which means changing the preprocessor and mucking around with the symbol table logic. It needs to support MPE iX procedure calling conventions, including those with variable-length argument lists, which means mucking around with the code generator. It may be necessary to modify the linker to deal with mangled function names, depending on how the mangling is done. Finally, the iostream library may need modification to handle MPEisms in the file system. Oh, and xdb and the system debugger would need to be modified to de-mangle function names (else they'd be pretty useless -- I've tried.) A "quick-and-dirty" port, not including any of these items, would probably be easy. It would also be difficult to sell and nearly impossible to support. Given the engineering effort necessary to do the job right, it's unlikely to happen. <sniff> Hurry up, Mark! -- Bruce