Path: utzoo!utgpu!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!rpi!zaphod.mps.ohio-state.edu!samsung!spool.mu.edu!uunet!mcsun!cernvax!chx400!chx400!olsen!nagler
From: nagler@olsen.UUCP (Rob Nagler)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.modula2
Subject: Re: Oberon-M Q's and A's
Summary: Fastest bug in The West isn't what I want
Keywords: Range Checking, Efficiency
Message-ID: <226@honold.UUCP>
Date: 25 Mar 91 10:55:00 GMT
References: <1991Mar22.173834.17328@tandem.com>
Reply-To: nagler@olsen.ch (Rob Nagler)
Organization: Olsen & Associates, Zurich, Switzerland
Lines: 28

In article <1991Mar22.173834.17328@tandem.com> erv@everest.TANDEM.COM (E. Videki) writes:
> 6) Due to the irregularities of the 80x86 architecture, code
> generation for it is ponderous. In my experience most professional
> programmers don't need or want the overhead of range or stack
> checking, so that is not provided.  Of course, this is a debatable
> issue. 

Don't you mean *pompous* programmers?  I suggest you debate the following...

Newsgroups: comp.sys.sun
From: pln@egret1.stanford.edu (Patrick L. Nolan)
Subject: Large disks hazardous to your data?
Date: 19 Mar 91 18:33:00 GMT
Message-ID: <1990@brchh104.bnr.ca>

The March 4 issue of Digital News has an article with the headline "User
data at risk with 1.2 GB disks."  Here are some excerpts from the article:

  Customers configuring ... SCSI hard disk drives of more than 1 GB run
  a serious risk of losing their stored data.
  ...
  According to SCSI specialists, the SCSI Group 0 set of commands,
  which are also embedded into some Sun Microsystems ... operating
  systems, can address a maximum of 1.073742 GBytes.  On disks
  with a larger formatted capacity, the SCSI I/O driver wraps
  around the disk and overwrites the first block of data, called
  the superblock or home block, thereby preventing access to the rest of
  the data on the disk....