Deep Blue C

The Deep Blue C (DBC) is one of the few C compilers for the Atari 8 bit. John H. Palevich is the author of this compiler. The syntax supported by DBC is close to the ANSI C with significant limitations.

Limitations

The following language constructs are not supported:^[1]

• structs
• unions
• multidimensional arrays
• floating point numbers
• sizeof operator
• type casting
• functions return integer only results

Other non-standard properties of Deep Blue C:

• The last part of "switch" clause must be ended with: "break", "continue" or "return".
• The maximum length of source code line has to be less than 80 characters.
• The number of arguments for functions cannot exceed 126.
• $( and $) are used instead of { and }.

Sample program

The exemplary program writes the "Hello World!" message on the user screen.^[2]

 main()
 $(
   printf("Hello World!");
 $)

Performance

The DBC compiler does not create the native executable for 6502 processor but intermediate code called C-code. The C-code is then executed by C-code interpreter.^[1] According to Atari 8-bit FAQ the DBC creates binary code for Intel 8080 processor and then executed by 8080 virtual machine.^[3] It has some similarities to today's Java platform and it is also the main cause of low performance of DBC-created code.

References