Path: utzoo!utgpu!water!watmath!clyde!att!chinet!mcdchg!nud!fishpond!fnf
From: fnf@fishpond.UUCP (Fred Fish)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.amiga.tech
Subject: Re: Need info on exceptions
Message-ID: <125@fishpond.UUCP>
Date: 28 Aug 88 06:16:32 GMT
References: <8808272322.AA03740@cory.Berkeley.EDU>
Reply-To: fnf@fishpond.UUCP (Fred Fish)
Organization: occasionally
Lines: 33

In article <8808272322.AA03740@cory.Berkeley.EDU> dillon@CORY.BERKELEY.EDU (Matt Dillon) writes:
>: [somebody besides Matt writes]
>:				An idea central to the Amiga
>:is that an address in any tasks address space is not a virtual 
>:address but a physical memory address. That means that you can hand 
>:a pointer off to another task and it will be valid in THAT tasks's address
>:space.

>	Yes, this *IS* a nice idea.

Personally I think this is the single biggest problem with the Amiga.  For
a process running in a multitasking environment, it is akin to living in
a society where it is perfectly acceptable for strangers to walk up to you
at any time and stick their fingers in your mouth to examine your teeth.
There is absolutely no concept of enforced privacy between processes.

This is why you have so many mysterious cases of "when I run program XXX
with program YYY, just after running program ZZZ with hardware AAA installed,
the machine gurus... sometimes".   The flakiness is not due to incompetent
programmers.  Everybody's programs have bugs in them, many of which will
happily trash memory that doesn't belong the them.  However, on the Amiga,
these problems will often go unnoticed or unresolved for months or years,
while on most Unix systems they will cause a core dump the first time
they occur, and get promptly fixed.

I think the Amiga is one of the most interesting computers ever made.
But it sorely needs memory management hardware and an operating system
that exploits it fully, for virtual memory and interprocess protection.

-Fred
-- 
# Fred Fish, 1346 West 10th Place, Tempe, AZ 85281,  USA
# noao!nud!fishpond!fnf                   (602) 921-1113