Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!cs.utexas.edu!mailrus!uflorida!haven!umd5!matthews
From: matthews@umd5.umd.edu (Mike Matthews)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.atari.st
Subject: Re: TOS 1.6...
Keywords: TOS source
Message-ID: <5939@umd5.umd.edu>
Date: 13 Jan 90 16:00:32 GMT
References: <9001100808.AA18195@ucbvax.Berkeley.EDU> <1252@electro.UUCP> <1990Jan11.182305.24007@chinet.chi.il.us> <1956@atari.UUCP>
Reply-To: matthews@umd5.umd.edu (Mike Matthews)
Organization: University of Maryland, College Park
Lines: 25

In article <1956@atari.UUCP> apratt@atari.UUCP (Allan Pratt) writes:
>The fallacy here is that you think we want you to know EXACTLY what TOS
>would do.  Publishing the source would make it impossible to change it,
>because people would start relying on accidental side-effects of
>operations.  When that happens, we can't change the code without
>breaking those programs or maintaining those previously-accidental side
>effects.  This is a maintenance nightmare.
>
[various examples deleted]
>
>============================================
>Opinions expressed above do not necessarily	-- Allan Pratt, Atari Corp.
>reflect those of Atari Corp. or anyone else.	  ...ames!atari!apratt

Yes, but it would seem that if there was a bug in the OS, the program would
crash anyway (or at least misbehave) if the code was written correctly, so it
would work with future versions of TOS.

There already IS a "maintenance nightmare" out there.  Programs crash on new
releases of the ROM because the programmers decided to ignore some rules.  Or
perhaps workaround some old bugs.  That's gonna happen no matter what.

(correct me if I'm wrong; I'm guessing at this mostly)

Mike