Relay-Version: version B 2.10 5/3/83; site utzoo.UUCP
Path: utzoo!mnetor!uunet!husc6!bloom-beacon!think!ames!lll-tis!ptsfa!hoptoad!academ!uhnix1!sugar!peter
From: peter@sugar.UUCP (Peter da Silva)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.amiga
Subject: Re: "kill"
Message-ID: <681@sugar.UUCP>
Date: Thu, 10-Sep-87 08:08:51 EDT
Article-I.D.: sugar.681
Posted: Thu Sep 10 08:08:51 1987
Date-Received: Sat, 12-Sep-87 16:25:49 EDT
References: <1708@amiga.amiga.UUCP> <581@sugar.UUCP> <935@unicus.UUCP> <1395@tao.UUCP>
Organization: Sugar Land UNIX - Houston, TX
Lines: 28
Summary: MS-DOS does not track resources.

Your heart's in the right place, but your reasoning isn't valid.

> Every other O/S I have dealt with (including MSDOS!) tracks resources.

While I think the lack of resource tracking in the Amiga is little short of
criminal (Rhetorical comment, but only semi :->), MS-DOS doesn't do any better.
Just try exiting a program without closing all your files first some time.
In fact the only PC operating system that does a better job than AmigaDOS is
the Mac finder. Of course it has a much simpler job: what with all a tasks
memory being in a fixed-size partition.

> [programmers can't] rely on the system to trap and protect the system from
> runaway programs,...

Resource tracking wouldn't help here. You would need hardware memory
protection. No other personal computer does any better here, except maybe
the Atari ST which has bounds registers... unfortunately, the O/S does
not make effective use of this feature of the hardware. I had as much or
more trouble with crashing on the ST as on the Amiga.

> So lets end the discussion, and simply ask Commodore to raise the priority
> of adding resource tracking to the top of the things-to-do list. I would even
> ask them to consider that it is really a bug.

Yes.
-- 
-- Peter da Silva `-_-' ...!seismo!soma!uhnix1!sugar!peter
--                 'U`  <-- Public domain wolf.