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ARM version of MSDOS (Announce)

posted by kerravon, Ligao, Free World North, 20.01.2024, 15:52

> Anyway, you are basically saying that programs that are easy to port are
> ... easy to port. Such a statement is (by definition) 100% true, but also
> 100% useless for practical purposes.
Depends what you call "practical purposes".

I am basically trying to set programming
standards for myself to follow even if noone
else does.

> > Then the question is - why weren't they written
> > in C90?
> > And the answer to that question would then open
> > up the possibility of finding out if there was
> > a way to overcome that (presumed) issue without
> > breaking portability.
>
> That sounds like somewhat more effort than "doing nothing at all". Unless
> you also wish to argue over the definition of "nothing".
The initial body of work - writing software -
obviously needs to be done, and obviously
isn't nothing.

And creating the standards wasn't "nothing"
either.

But perhaps it is the ANSI X3J11 committee I think
it was called that fell short.

They probably fell short for quite valid reasons.

One of them being that they needed to produce
something ASAP, not wait 35 years like I have done.

So I don't think they would have got everything
right when it comes to setting standards for
MSDOS programmers to follow, that will, 35 years
later, allow those programs to port to that ARM
computer with a battery life of 22 hours.

> In practical terms, when it comes to thinking about how to bring MS-DOS
> programs into a multi-tasking world, someone like Raymond Chen, who at the
> very least has been there "in the trenches", has more cachet to me. He
> knows whereof he speaks.
>
> Do you think you happen to know something he does not? And why?
I've spent 35 years writing C90-compliant software
and it ports just fine to anywhere.

Even to the mainframe. And I even made the mainframe
conform to an EBCDIC version of ANSI X3.64 so that I
could have fullscreen apps.

You could argue that ANSI X3.64 is insufficient in
the MSDOS world - you need more colors than ANSI
defines to be commercially successful or something
like that.

And once you move to graphics all bets are off as
I haven't gone there yet.

If that's the answer - so be it.

But I'd like to first establish that when it comes
to text - even fullscreen text (which is the limit
of what blind people can "read"), there is no reason
why an MSDOS application can't be written in a
language other than assembler and be portable to
basically anywhere.

Can you cite a system call or concept or technique
that an MSDOS programmer must use (presumably to
either fit in 640k or to be commercially viable)
and by doing so, the program cannot port?

If the answer is "direct writes to 0xb8000 cannot
be avoided" then I would like to ask followup
questions.

BFN. Paul.

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