CompuServe Messages

Steve; Did not mean to "touch a button." I would have suspected that you were aware of the importance of not breaking the rules. I also appreciate the frustration of not being able to do something that you believe that you should be able to do, particularly when that same thing can be done on other machines. The AmigaBasic reference was to MicroSoft and the fact that they did what ever they wanted to do to make AmigaBasic work on an Amiga 1000 under AMigaDOS 1.1, regardless of the rules. MicroSoft did things like use the upper 8 bits of address for storage. Of course their program broke when accellerators became available. For other reasons, the program broke on most other versions of the OS. As an interesting aside, I understand that it appears that the original ABasic (available on AmigaDOS 1.0 only) works on an Amiga 3000 with DOS 2.0 (it would break on DOS 1.3 however). Much of the "pain" that we live with now is due to the "rule breaking" that was performed by the programmers that wrote many of the more popular Amiga programs. Unfortunately, even AmigaDOS 2.0 still has allowances for improperly written programs. I'll admit that I would not want to be a part of the group that has to make the decisions in that area… its a tough call. The very health of the machine hangs on such decisions. While most of the programming community curses BCPL, the folks that wrote AmigaDOS 1.0 managed to do it in somthing around a couple of months. The production of such a massive software undertaking is such a short time is amazing. C= has been weeding out the BCPL ever since. SAS has been a very strong supporter of both following C='s rules and keeping the "heat on" so that C= set rules that we can live with. A great deal of SAS's efforts have been to improve the quality of AmigaDOS itself. An Amiga message processed by Whap!, bill