Path: utzoo!attcan!utgpu!watmath!watdragon!rose!ccplumb
From: ccplumb@rose.waterloo.edu (Colin Plumb)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.amiga.tech
Subject: Re: Questions about BCPL & listboxes
Keywords: BCPL listboxes spam
Message-ID: <16791@watdragon.waterloo.edu>
Date: 29 Sep 89 16:19:55 GMT
References: <3798@spudge.UUCP>
Sender: daemon@watdragon.waterloo.edu
Reply-To: ccplumb@rose.waterloo.edu (Colin Plumb)
Distribution: na
Organization: U. of Waterloo, Ontario
Lines: 21

In article <3798@spudge.UUCP> johnm@spudge.UUCP (John Munsch) writes:
>1:  I have read that all traces of BCPL are being expunged from AmigaDos 1.4.
>My question is, does that mean that BPTR's will also go away?  If so, then
>won't a great deal of software break?  If not, then what will the average
>programmer see as being different?

No, the documented interfaces will remain.  The change means that the
undocumented BCPL-internal interfaces will be going away, so people
can patch the dos.library and such without also having to patch the
corresponding entry in the BCPL global vector or whatever mess.  If you're
trying to write a replacement CLI, the fact that all the Commodore-standard
utilities are written in BCPL and use magic undocumented BCPL techniques
to get their arguments and do everything makes it very difficult.

The average programmer will be able to write a replacement CLI that doesn't
use Nasty Tricks, SetFuncion() the dos.library just like all the others,
and not have to worry about every dos.library call grabbing 1.5 K off the
stack and setting up all the address registers with really wierd values.
Also, the code should be a lot faster - the BCPL compiler is pretty stupid.
-- 
	-Colin