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From: aduncan@rhea.trl.OZ.AU (Allan Duncan)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.amiga.programmer
Subject: Re: Source to OS (Was Re: Information on Amiga Technical Reference Ser
Message-ID: <1991Jun17.222807.20272@trl.oz.au>
Date: 17 Jun 91 22:28:07 GMT
References: <22497@cbmvax.commodore.com>
Sender: news@trl.oz.au (USENET News System)
Organization: Telecom Research Labs, Melbourne, Australia
Lines: 26

From article <22497@cbmvax.commodore.com>, by mks@cbmvax.commodore.com (Michael Sinz):
[...]
> If you can not program the system from the documentation and any clarification
> given by CATS or Engineering, then the source code would be of no help.
> It is rather foolish to think that the source would be a better way to
> understand what a function does.  Many (most) times, the amount of time
> it would talk (and skill) to understand all of the aspects of a piece of
> code is many orders of magnitude more than just reading the documenation.

I agree that the source alone is not the way to go, but it can give the
occasional _insight_ into a problem.
Case in point - I was doing some work with the parallel port and
interrupts.  Now what I wanted to did not appear in _any_ examples,
either RKM or Fish that I could find.  What I could find that were
analogous on the surface were misleading.  The long shot of it was that
I finally got the clues necessary to understand the RKM's very brief and
scatttered info on the topic and hints from queries here by walking the
interrupt process starting at the vectors themselves.  The clarity of
vision that resulted fixed all my misunderstandings at once.  It also
showed me that a 7MHz 68000 is sailing pretty close to the wind at high
interrupt loads.

Allan Duncan	ACSnet	 a.duncan@trl.oz
(+613) 541 6708	Internet a.duncan@trl.oz.au
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