Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!lll-winken!ames!mailrus!tut.cis.ohio-state.edu!ucbvax!UICVM.BITNET!U46050
From: U46050@UICVM.BITNET (JOHN ZAFIRIS)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.atari.st
Subject: nullfilling
Message-ID: <8903010551.AA25974@ucbvax.Berkeley.EDU>
Date: 1 Mar 89 05:20:58 GMT
Sender: daemon@ucbvax.BERKELEY.EDU
Organization: The Internet
Lines: 29

Hello all:  I was just thinking about the whole nullfilling mess.  Yeah,
I know... not this again...  Wait, wait, this might actually make sense:

To Atari Corp:  What do you think of the idea of allowing the program
that is run to decide if it wants the memory blanked?  I know that the
code that you are now using is really fast but there is still a
noticible real time delay when running programs (smaller ones
especially) on a machine with a few meg of memory.

Here's the proposal:  Atari, write 4 instructions worth of code into
those new, amazing, almost-as-good-as-sliced bread v.1.4 ROMS that check
the last 4 bytes of the program that was just loaded (I'm sure that 4
instructions are able to fit into that 192K or ROM).  If those last 4
bytes are some magic value, say 628318530 (2*pi, yes, I know, really
original...) then the memory clearing code is just ignored.  This would
make all present software automatically compatible and all future
software better written (people will think before writting code that
assumes what it shouldn't (blank mem) (yes, I know, K&R says this and
K&R says that... hooey!  I don't like C anyway).  Best of all, this is
completely optional.  The software developer who wants the extra speed
can get it and he/she who doesn't does not have to do anything... just
as if it were still 1985.

Atari, think about it and even better, do it.
Everybody else, what do you think?  Is this a brilliant idea or (embarassment:)
has this been suggested before or is it for some reason stupid and it will
never work?

either way, let me know...                          ...John Zafiris