C integral types [was Re: Semi-OT: Why Kids Can't use Computers] (fwd)

[Christopher Browne]

On Fri, Aug 16, 2013 at 2:52 PM, Lennart Sorensen
<lsorense-1wCw9BSqJbv44Nm34jS7GywD8/FfD2ys at public.gmane.org> wrote:
> On Thu, Aug 15, 2013 at 08:26:25PM -0400, Stewart C. Russell wrote:
>> There are a surprising number of UK non-computer-science types for whom
>> their first compiled language was one of these C-precursors: BCPL. It
>> was possible to write a particularly tiny compiler for the language, and
>> there were versions for the BBC Micro (6502) and the Amstrad CPC (Z80)
>> which ran from a 16 KB EPROM.
>>
>> It was also the first language taught at Cambridge to all Computer
>> Science students. It later became the source of much ire in the Amiga
>> world, as early (buggy) versions of AmigaDOS were basically the Tripos
>> OS developed at Cambridge, entirely in BCPL.
>
> It may have had bugs, but it sure worked well.  I found DOS running a
> single applications crashed more often than AmigaDOS did multitasking
> on hardware with no memory protection.  It was pretty darn impressive.

Part of that falls from the fact that there were a zillion bizarrely slightly
different DOS systems, and hackers that tended to write *horribly*
hacky code that would consciously tweak at the differences.

If, on AmigaDOS, you were running reasonably cleanly written C-based
apps that weren't poking sticks (badly!) at hardware registers all the time,
that's going to be a lot more stable.

Writing to the screen, on MS-DOS, was a lot worse than it ought to have
been :-(
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