Re: Open Call for DOS Developers
- Posted by SDPringle Apr 17, 2013
- 6756 views
(As an aside, I always found it ironic that Shawn Pringle fought to keep DOS support in the end when he helped kill it in the first place (by breaking the build for DOS-only users when he rewrote the makefile to use exw.exe to build ex.exe,trying to solve a problem that I had already solved before).)
Please don't libel me in this way. The Makefile was broken many but many times. Using exwc vs. ex.exe in a makefile is a really trivial change and trivial to change back if it were a problem. We simply didn't have the resources to port to DOS32 the features that were being written for Linux and Windows only. That being said, I would have preferred to offer this alternative to those whose applications do not require the features of modern OSes to prevent e-waste.
I also wanted the configure script to not assume memory addresses returned by malloc would always be a multiple of 8 by default. This was essential to working in a DOS environment in which malloc doesn't always return addresses as a multiple of 8. Because I am not admin, I didn't have the final say on this. So now, if you take euphoria 4.0.0 and try to run it on a Windows 95 box it will die with an assertion code error. Yuck.
One can either refuse to upgrade anything or they must eventually drop their computers into landfills. As programs break compatibility with older OSes and as programs and OSes demand more and more hardware, you eventually cannot upgrade EUPHORIA without upgrading the OS, you can't upgrade the OS without upgrading hardware. Eventually your motherboard cannot be upgraded any further and you must buy a new computer.
[edited for structure] I believe EUPHORIA will work with Windows 2000 or newer.
Shawn Pringle
