Path: utzoo!utgpu!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!cs.utexas.edu!sun-barr!olivea!uunet!van-bc!rsoft!mindlink!a218
From: Charlie_Gibbs@mindlink.bc.ca (Charlie Gibbs)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.amiga.programmer
Subject: Re: Short Hello World
Message-ID: <5967@mindlink.bc.ca>
Date: 22 May 91 15:31:55 GMT
Organization: MIND LINK! - British Columbia, Canada
Lines: 32

>6 bytes more than necessary!

     I wonder how many hundreds of kilobytes have passed through
the net arguing about six bytes.  Heck, I was seldom so concerned
even when I was programming 16K boxes!

     Lighten up, folks, and heed this warning: MS-DOS.

     That's what you wind up with when you become obsessed with
backward compatibility.  The 80x86 family is so horrible mostly
because Intel wanted an easy conversion from the 8080.  Hence its
segment registers and 64K (let alone 640K) limits.

     MS-DOS itself, being no more than a glorified CP/M, has
inherited its own share of warts (and I've discovered a lot of
them the hard way).

     It never ceases to amaze me that millions of people spend so
much time kludging their way around such a brain-damaged system.
What amazes me even more, though, is that they discuss such things
with a straight face, while denouncing other things that consume
a fraction of the time they spend on this stuff.

     I'd much rather have a couple of sloppily-written pieces of
software break five years from now -- and that only if the authors
don't clean up their act in the meantime -- than to have to carry
along a lot of excess baggage from the past.  Come on, guys, let
the Commodore folks continue to do what they're doing.  I'd rather
they did it their way then have another IBM/Intel/Microsoft fiasco.

Charlie_Gibbs@mindlink.bc.ca
Intel put the "backward" in "backward compatibility."