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Path: utzoo!utgpu!water!watnot!watmath!clyde!rutgers!mit-eddie!bu-cs!bucsb.bu.edu!madd
From: madd@bucsb.bu.edu.UUCP
Newsgroups: comp.sys.ibm.pc
Subject: Re: How to exit turbo pascal withou
Message-ID: <773@bucsb.bu.edu.UUCP>
Date: Wed, 25-Feb-87 23:37:22 EST
Article-I.D.: bucsb.773
Posted: Wed Feb 25 23:37:22 1987
Date-Received: Sat, 28-Feb-87 01:15:25 EST
References: <694@sgi.SGI.COM> <75800027@uiucdcsp>
Reply-To: madd@bucsb.bu.edu.UUCP (Jim "Jack" Frost)
Organization: ODO (Organization for the Disorganization of Organization)
Lines: 23

In article <75800027@uiucdcsp> vanzandt@uiucdcsp.cs.uiuc.edu writes:
>	What would Turbo's dynamic memory allocation have to do with DOS
>needing COMMAND.COM????

Simple.  COMMAND.COM will preserve itself if it can when loading in
programs.  If your machine has a lot of memory, you seldom end up
reloading the command.com processor.  However, if your machine has
relatively little memory, command.com will be overwritten when the
program loads.  After this, DOS will reload command.com from disk.  So
if you cut down the size of the turbo stack/heap, the odds are better
that command.com will survive.  Even if the allocation in Turbo is
large enough to encompass the area where command.com lives,
command.com is not necessarily destroyed.  DOS does a check to see if
command.com is intact before reloading, in case the program allocated
the memory but failed to use it.  In this case, it would be useless to
reload from disk, so it doesn't.

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                   - Jim Frost * The Madd Hacker -
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