Hi Jay, OS/2 and Amiga had a shell and a POSIX layer (proto-POSIX layer?) that was reasonably amenable to the GCC toolchain. MPW is not such a shell, as I recall. MPW was more like interfacing with bash using emacs -- a document interface to a shell, rather than a terminal-ish interface to a streaming shell. I think to get GCC to run on OS9, you'd first need to do what Cygwin did for Windows... make a POSIX API-compatible workalike layer for OS9, and then compile bash or tcsh to that POSIX API-workalike layer. A bit of a chicken-and-egg problem, though. You may need to write your POSIX layer in assembly, or using Metrowerks. And even though the early Macs were very amazing for end-users, they did introduce some interesting challenges for programmers -- especially for porting tools from the Unix side of the universe. Anyway, after having a suitable environment, you would still need to write the backend for GCC, since OS9 uses PEF and the CFM. All-in-all, it would be a lot of effort, and a labor of love. I'd take a long hard look at the available (vintage) tools and strongly consider embracing them instead. After all, they went hand-in-hand with that operating system. (Sorry to be a killjoy.) Sincerely, --Eljay Apple II Forever! (Marketing has defined "forever" to be "about 10 years".)
