Re: assembler [was: Re: cheers for gogo]

["Robert Speed" <nospam [at] Viclabs.co.uk>]

On 14 Mar 00, at 10:29, Al Hudson wrote:

> 
> RISC-OS is well known for the sh*t code, tho' ;). In fact, most Acorn
> products suffer from it. I know someone very interested in (old) Acorn
> OSes, and he had a chat with Sophie Wilson at one point (the guy who wrote
> BBC BASIC). Sophie said that the majority of the OS "wasn't in
Yes, I met Roger (as was) during the development of ARX (A 
Unix(esc) type OS running on an ARM across the tube) - incredibly 
intelligent person.

> human-readable form". Sophie was also well-known for not wasting bytes on
> variable names, labels, etc..... the OS seems to suffer from that too.
> OSWGBPB being a particularly good example (O.S. word get-byte put-byte).
This could have been due to having look up tables for various SWI 
and SYS calls.

> There's all kind of cruft in the OS caused by this type of programming.
> It'll be interesting to see what Pace (& the others) do with the Acorn
> stuff though - I hear they're basically chucking most of it out.
Maybe so, the font renderer and printing system are probably the 
only things worth keeping.

It's still remarkably quick and easy to dev stuff for though, despite 
not having anywhere as near as many 'features' as Unix or
(spit.. M$ bloat).


Rob S.
Vickers (Laboratories) Ltd.
Grangefield Industrial Estate, Pudsey, Leeds LS28 6QW
Switchboard: +44 (0)113 236 2811   Fax: +44 (0)113 236 2703

All opinions are my own and ! Vickers.
The nice thing about Windows is that it doesn't just crash.
It displays a dialogue box and lets you click OK first.
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