CompuServe Messages

Modula Keyb.

#: 67541 S8/Amiga at WorkForum unknown
    13-May-87 19:53:28
Sb: #67475-Modula Keyb.
Fm: John Draper 76703,4322
To: Peter da Silva 70216,1076

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Peter, I take it then that you think that Modula, Pascal, LISP, FORTH and Fortran people should be happy that the OS is documented in C? I sure don't. I disagree that the OS is _running_ BCPL. It is running 68000 machine code, whose closest human readable analog is assembler. The fact that _some_ of the system routines were written in BCPL only 'colours' the code in that certain things tend to be done in particular ways, and the portions that were written in C are likewise 'coloured' in the manner that C compilers tend to colour code. The OS is not "made to look like" anything except by those that wrote the documentation. If a particular routine looks on the stack for its arguments, then that's where they should be when you call it. I feel that it really is up to the compiler writers to document the user interface for their own language, in a manner that fits the language, and that their actual interface code should not mess about pushing and popping, but go as directly as possible to the state at which everything is set up for the actual (machine code) call.