🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <1332@osupyr.mps.ohio-state.edu> Vidhyanath K. Rao <vkr@cis.ohio-state.edu> writes:
>In article <SHADOW.89Aug2040433@pawl.rpi.edu>
>Deven>AmigaDOS?  More elegant than Unix?  Don't make me laugh.
>
>I would say that AmigaDOS looks like a project from a B student: A good
>concept, but implementation shows lack of imagination and more importantly,
>inability to adapt to a different evoirment: Relying on BCPL thruout is only
>one instance of it. Another example [why I would give the implementation
>a B rather than an A] is packets implemented to support only
>co-routines, hijacking of the Message.Node.Name field etc. But I side with
>Bernie: Conceptually, AmigaDOS is more evolved than Unix. But then, it did
>come latter.

	Two things to remember: 1) Tripos (aka AmigaDOS) was developed at
Cambridge University; 2) BCPL is _the_ language at Cambridge, much in the
way C is in most US unversities (lately).  The C-style interfaces on top of
AmigaDOS were dropped onto an OS designed for BCPL.  That's changing now,
of course, since we have little reason to want to encourage BCPL on the
Amiga.

	AmigaDOS's design includes features that only recently appeared in
any Unix variant, such as user-process filesystems, etc.  Unix has been 
fine-tuned and revised many, many times.  It still carries the results of
some less pretty design decisions, though, and it shows it's age, for
all the improvements and tweaks added over the years.  AmigaDOS is much less
refined, and currently has some implementation oddities, but the basic
design is arguably a bit cleaner and more modern.  Hopefully we'll have the
chance to clean up and refine the desing and implementation over the years
as Unix has done.  We are a bit more beholden to the great god compatiblity
than most Unix developers are, though.

-- 
Randell Jesup, Keeper of AmigaDos, Commodore Engineering.
{uunet|rutgers}!cbmvax!jesup, jesup@cbmvax.cbm.commodore.com  BIX: rjesup  
Common phrase heard at Amiga Devcon '89: "It's in there!"