Building an engineering application for the PC-386

Abstract

With the advent of the Intel 80386 chip, the road has been cleared for application programmers to build large PC software products. This article describes our experience developing a complex engineering package designed specifically for the PC-386. The topics discussed include planning of the development approach, choice of the operating system and the programming language, programming methods and tools, and software integration techniques. The integration involves connecting analytical modules with each other and with menu-driven interfaces and graphics. The construction of a simple built-in text editor linked to specialized graphics modules is discussed. The paper also contains our comments and suggestions regarding the development tools and standards for programming languages. We hope our experience will be useful for application programmers, system programmers and developers of programming tools. © 1992.