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

[Lennart Sorensen]

On Fri, Aug 16, 2013 at 04:41:53PM -0400, Christopher Browne wrote:
> 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.

But if you are writing C and get a pointer address messed up, on the Amiga
you could take out a different application running since everything was
in one memory space.  At least on DOS it could only crash the application
itself.  The fact this rarely happened made me pretty impressed at the
quality of code people were producing for the Amiga.

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

Well that is true.  DOS was pretty horrible.

-- 
Len Sorensen
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