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From: consp11@bingvaxu.cc.binghamton.edu (Brett L. Kessler)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.amiga
Subject: Re: Stability of Commodore/Amiga
Summary: Contiguous memory vs. Fragmented memory
Keywords: Unix, Amiga, OS/2, DOS
Message-ID: <3093@bingvaxu.cc.binghamton.edu>
Date: 5 Mar 90 19:05:54 GMT
References: <476087196@deimos.cis.ksu.edu> <19000039@attcc.UUCP> <2840@mtuni.ATT.COM> <676@xdos.UUCP> <3881@nmtsun.nmt.edu> <48ffd21f.db93@edsel.engin.umich.edu> <3883@nmtsun.nmt.edu>
Reply-To: consp11@bingvaxu.cc.binghamton.edu.cc.binghamton.edu (Brett L. Kessler)
Organization: SUNY Binghamton, NY
Lines: 22

In article <3883@nmtsun.nmt.edu> dksnsr@nmtsun.nmt.edu (Dr. Mosh) writes:
>I don't know if I could say OS/2 is more programmer friendly, as far as
>memory management goes, it is more organized since OS/2 uses contiguous 
>spaces of memory compared to the chunks that Amiga's Exec does...  but that
>is not necessarily an advantage either...

IMHO, contiguous memory is not the way to go.  If I have a 300k
program on a contiguos-memory-based machine (ie: Mac) that has a 290k
area free and a 50k area free, the program still cannot be loaded,
becuase the areas are not contiguous.

Linked lists (and related structures) are a much more efficient way of
allocating memory.  True, it incurs a bit of overhead and requires
some work by he programmer (of the OS, that is), but the 300k program
example from before would load just fine into an Amiga - it doesn't
require contiguous blocks to know what it's doing.

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