Path: utzoo!attcan!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!tut.cis.ohio-state.edu!rutgers!mcnc!rti!bcw From: bcw@rti.UUCP (Bruce Wright) Newsgroups: comp.sys.ibm.pc Subject: Re: Current Process in MSDOS Summary: Not all DOS versions have it ... Message-ID: <2949@rti.UUCP> Date: 12 May 89 02:32:45 GMT References: <13777@steinmetz.ge.com> Distribution: usa Organization: Research Triangle Institute, RTP, NC Lines: 30 In article <13777@steinmetz.ge.com>, dixon@sagittarius.steinmetz (walt dixon) writes: > The current PSP is stored in a DOS global variable and presumably you could > access its contents directly; of course this technique is highly dependent > on the DOS version. I don't understand the reluctance to use the DOS > functions to retrieve this value. The PSP manipulation services do no stack > switching and are always safe (if properly used) -- at least in all DOS 3.1 > and above. Don't know about DOS 4.0 and 4.0.1. The unfortunate thing about MessyDos is that there have been a series of half-baked additions to the system. (caused by an almost total lack of design in both the original and the subsequent versions). The PSP functions (as well as a number of other useful functions) did not exist in earlier versions of the system; they are new (or at least newly supported) with 3.0. Many programs want to do some of those things without checking the version number all the time (which is what they SHOULD do, but ...). This has had to be done because the market has demanded that most applications work on almost any version of DOS -- even the brain-dead V1.0. About the only positive thing about MS-DOS is that it unified the PC environment so that you could be pretty sure that if it was a PC, it ran MS-DOS. Simplifies things enormously, both for the developer and for the user. It appears that we are going to trade one evil (the poverty of MS-DOS) for another (a totally fragmented market with each OS architecture only getting a fraction of the total market). Offhand I think I prefer the second - at least you have the possibility of improving your own situation even if nobody else's - but it's still not all that attractive. Bruce C. Wright