🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <1423@atari.UUCP> kbad@atari.UUCP (Ken Badertscher) writes:
>Quite a few things in TOS are documented and have no useful function.
>That does not mean that programmers can or should have carte blanche to
>use these features.  Nor should anyone assume that the useless features
>will retain the same behavior in future TOS revisions.  It is
>unfortunate that the BETA TOS developer documentation was unclear on the
>lack of usefulness of the shel_put() and shel_get() AES calls, but that
>oversight will be corrected in the final release notes.
> 
>  Don't do illegal stuff with your software, please.  We are no longer
>constrained to strict software compatibility in future TOS revisions,
>and I, for one, intend to take advantage of that fact.  This means that
>I will be implementing enhancements which will almost certainly break
>software that either a) didn't follow the rules in the first place, or
>b) was built on bad assumptions about the internal workings of TOS.

Thank you, Ken, for the information you have been giving everyone on
the net.  I'd only like to point out that without decent
documentation, it's a little hard for software developers to even know
what the rules are.  It used to be that "illegal" was synonymous with
"undocumented"; however, your note suggests that even this is an
oversimplification, and "documented but useless" also implies
"illegal" and "likely to change in future releases of TOS".  I welcome
well-thought-out enhancements to TOS---they will make the ST's more
useful to everyone.  But the long-overdue "official" TOS documentation
is also important.  I hope Atari is making a renewed effort to finally
get that out the door.
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| Michael Fischer                                |
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