Path: utzoo!utgpu!utstat!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!cornell!uw-beaver!microsoft!t-stephp
From: t-stephp@microsoft.UUCP (Stephen Poole)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.mac
Subject: Re: MAJOR MAC IIx PROBLEMS!!!!! APP
Message-ID: <51@microsoft.UUCP>
Date: 6 Feb 89 03:18:08 GMT
References: <35965@think.UUCP> <46100273@uxe.cso.uiuc.edu>
Reply-To: t-stephp@microsoft.UUCP (Stephen Poole)
Organization: Microsoft Corp., Redmond WA
Lines: 54

In article <46100273@uxe.cso.uiuc.edu> mcdonald@uxe.cso.uiuc.edu writes:
>And for good reason. When I tried programming a MAC, it was devilishly
>difficult to get any good, useable info. It all looked like it
>was written for Pascal, and I was using Fortran. Besides, Apple
>clearly stated "One Mac, the same, Now And Forever". They never
>mentioned Multifinder or anything else. I wrote a perfectly 100%
>legal Fortran program that won't run on a Mac II. This has NEVER
>and I mean NEVER happened on any other computer in the 25 years I have
>been programming! A 100% (and I DO mean 100%) legal Fortran program
>should continue to run. Programs I wrote under VMS 1.00 run fine
>under 5.0. Programs I wrote under 1.1 of OS360 ran until I
>got sick of IBM ( :-( ). Programs under under MS-DOS 2.1 run fine under
>4.01, as well as multitask under Windows 386 (they all run under regular
>Windows, but only the 100% Fortran or ANSI C ones multitask.)
>
>Why is the Mac different?

The Mac is not as different as you think.  It's ridiculous to believe that
poorly written code which bypasses recommended methods of accomplishing
something through OS routines is going to necessarily run under future
releases of the operating system.  The vast majority of Mac code which WAS
properly written functions just fine on more recent machines with more
recent operating system versions.

It's easy to conceive of reasons why your 100% legal FORTRAN program no
longer works.  Possibilities include the generation of code by the compiler
that was not in accordance with Apple's guidelines for compatibility with
future releases, code that was self modifying and thus gets hosed because
of the 68020's instruction cache, and  coding on your part that utilized
low-level OS functions in a manner which was not likely to keep working as
the operating system evolved.  Just because your program was 100% FORTRAN
legal hardly means that it was 100% Macintosh OS legal.  In fact, it
obviously was not if it breaks on the II.

The same thing can most assuredly happen under MS-DOS.  Consider the
different manner in which a C program receives argv[0] under DOS 2.x and
DOS 3.x and 4.x.  The simple reality is that MS-DOS is 
considerably less complex than the Macintosh operating system and has
remained far more static.  Despite this, don't kid yourself that there
aren't a host of DOS 2.x and 3.x programs that trash completely under
DOS 4.x.

The bottom line, I guess, is that there are an awful lot of programmers
who don't quite play by the rules and then bitch interminably when a new
machine or operating system release comes out that changes something upon
which their ill-behaved program relied.  It seems to me that Apple has done
a pretty good job of upgrading MacOS without breaking their own rules.


-- 
-- Stephen D. Poole -- t-stephp@microsoft.UUCP -- Mac II Fanatic --
--                                                               --
-- I'm just an Oregon Tech Software Engineering co-op at  Micro- --
-- soft.  Believe me, nobody here pays attention to my opinions! --