winscape 2231

An operating system IS supposed to protect itself from user apps. If the hardware won't help, it can at least not document the addresses its own internal data as the preferred method of access.

DOS looks and acts more like a bootloader with a filesystem attached. Bootloaders don't attempt to solve OS problems and give you no help at all with application support. Their main job in life is to load the next program- presumably the OS- and add some basic debug support to help figure out why the damn thing won't load.

Both of us come to this argument having been intimately involved with the internals of a number of operating systems. BAH has more big OS experience than I, I probably have more experience with the small ones. What OS experience do you bring to the table?

Why? Have you worked with satellite flight software and therefore know how FAT may and may not fit in such an application?

FAT is in fact desirable because of its very low overhead on smaller filesystems. Its undesirable because its fragile and not very fault tolerant and any filesystem integrity checks tend to be homebrewed instead of well-specified.

The point is that there is very little in DOS that is designed. Are you seriously proposing that DOS was designed to not be able to fix its own filesystem? It has chkdsk of course for what thats worth- was it designed to miss huge clbuttes of filesystem errrors and create a 3rd party market for utilities that actually do the job properly?

It took Microsoft including it to take the money out of the 3rd party market to do that- maybe it was DOS 6.2.

It CLEARLY tries to be more than similar. When you start adding stdio, pipes and shells then you have done more than try to make it similar. If thats a goal then fine, but to go from that to screwing up the command-line formats then its starting to be willfully different.

Neither does Unix but you won't find the profusion of punctuation in Unix except for a very few exceptions.

You will observe the quanbreasty of "Undocumented DOS" books in the nearest bookstore- or would have a few years ago. They are the precursor to the Learn X in 21 days ilk.

Now you're starting to make sense.

Nope. You're simply being a twit.

Gregm