Subj : short like .COM
To   : Fred Kantor
From : David Noon
Date : Sat Jan 13 2001 10:47 am

Hi Fred,

Replying to a message of Fred Kantor to David Noon:

 FK> One of the things which I missed in OS/2, was the convenience of
 FK> being able to write very short assembly language programs,
 FK> including self-modifying programs, without a lot of overhead.

[moderating]
To the "purists" reading this: please don't post diatribes against 
self-modifying code. Some of us are old enough to have been taught this 
practice at university, and some even feel it can still have a place in 
programming.
[end moderator mode]

 FK> So, some time ago, I wrote a text program launcher that let's one do
 FK> that in protected-mode, flat 32-bit address form, in OS/2. E.g.,
 FK> "Hello, world" is less than 70 bytes long.

Well, most of the assembler hackers in this echo can do that in reentrant code. 
.... :-)

A more persuasive argument would be to demonstrate a more comprehensive program 
using greatly reduced resources compared to the reentrant coding practices that 
are implicit on the Intel platform in protected mode.

 FK> If I may ask... might that be of any interest to anyone here?

I recall downloading it from your Web site a few years ago [the archive's 
timestamp says I d/l'ed it on 27th April 1997 at 18:07.], but I never got 
around to playing with it.

Since all users of the OS/2 Warp Developer's Toolkit 4.0 have the ALP 
assembler, they have at least the capability to use your software.

Regards

Dave
<Team PL/I>

--- FleetStreet 1.25.1
 * Origin: My other computer is an IBM S/390 (2:257/609.5)

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