h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

I prefer the 'Fluffy Project: The Kitten' though...

http://www.yoxio.com/images.php?id=24311

App, no problems with X on XP/Cygwin it is a lot more stable than it used to be

porn ... ya mean M$ well, it's fun to corrupt

Many years ago, before X was thought of, I used a Unix box at work. Last year, I got very interested in SourceForge etc.

But after obtaining Cygwin online - it worked well enough - I downloaded vast tracts of source code. Despite investing around a month of spare time, I had not manage to compile a single piece of their code. I had their compiler, linker and associated tools as downloaded binaries. It seemed that everything was built in some special script language, and a different one at each stage.

Various e-mails to various places, requesting help, brought forth not one reply. So I obtained Visual C++, which also interests me. But, although I have spent only a few hours trying this out, I have got nowhere. This time, I know what I want to do, and have done it before in MSDOS, and MSC/MASM, but find that even "Hello World" is an impenetrable multi-module affair in Windows.

It seems that with both these routes, anyone on there own really is just that, with a huge learning curve before one can get started. I guess that at colleges, one is guided along, and picks up these things gradually.

I think my main aim now (away from h2g2) would be to get going with one or other of these systems, but have so far made no progress. Has anyone got any suggestions how I might proceed?

My machine runs W2000, and I have Visual Studio 6, complete with MSDN. For the more Unix-like route, I need to use Cygwin or something similar, but really like the idea of having the source code for all the tools, including the compiler and linker.

The thing I want to work on is a floating point system, with variable precision (including very high precisions). My interest in the compiler source is to be able to integrate such C statements as x=5.3; into code using my precison (not the limited precision supplied by any compiler), but I have a work-around for this in C++.

Can anyone help me to get started?

erm my c aint nowhere near good enough to even attempt to give advice to anyone but as to taking the Unix route also take a look at Mingw (part of the Msys package). It's main advantage over the Cygwin compiler is that the native Windows programs it produces do not rely on any 3rd-party C runtime DLLs unlike Cygwin which require the Cygwin dll.

http://www.mingw.org/

I've been using cygwin/xfree to run unix apps over an ssh connection on winxp, it saves me having to reboot into linux. It's fine for doing that but I've not done anything more sophisticated with it.