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Path: utzoo!watmath!watnot!watdcsu!rsellens
From: rsellens@watdcsu.UUCP (Rick Sellens - Mech. Eng.)
Newsgroups: net.micro.pc
Subject: Re: New DOS Interrupt List Posted
Message-ID: <1576@watdcsu.UUCP>
Date: Wed, 31-Jul-85 14:03:52 EDT
Article-I.D.: watdcsu.1576
Posted: Wed Jul 31 14:03:52 1985
Date-Received: Thu, 1-Aug-85 21:57:39 EDT
References: <363@timeinc.UUCP>
Reply-To: rsellens@watdcsu.UUCP (Rick Sellens - Mech. Eng.)
Distribution: net
Organization: U of Waterloo, Ontario
Lines: 31
Summary: 

In article <363@timeinc.UUCP> greenber@timeinc.UUCP (Ross M. Greenberg) writes:
>
>What you've all been waiting for:  the new and improved DOS List
>of Interrupt Vectors.   Ta-Ta-Ta-Tah!!!
>
>And it would be nice if everybody pestered the folks on the net from
>Microsoft to fill in some of the UNKNOWN's below.  I should
>hope that they know what they're for.


It strikes me that "used internally by DOS" is a perfectly legitimate
description. As soon as you document the function of an interrupt you
make an intrinsic commitment that all future releases of DOS will
support that interrupt. This could make it very difficult to upgrade
the system in a reasonably neat way.

The use of undocumented "features" makes your code dependent on a 
particular version of the operating system. I would suggest that you
use undocumented interrupts *only* when there is no other way to
accomplish what you want to do. When this occurs you should pester
Microsoft to *add* a feature to the next release of the operating
system.

I hope the software I'm using now wasn't written with dirty code,
because eventually I might like to upgrade to DOS 3.0 or 4.0 or 5.0....


Rick Sellens
UUCP:  watmath!watdcsu!rsellens
CSNET: rsellens%watdcsu@waterloo.csnet
ARPA:  rsellens%watdcsu%waterloo.csnet@csnet-relay.arpa