10 May
2024
10 May
'24
8:36 p.m.
On Fri, 10 May 2024, Stuff Received via cctalk wrote:
I recall that MS sold a Pascal compiler, possibly from
someone else. It was
very slow and buggy. I heard a story that to speed up disc access, MS put
FAT-manipulation code in the actual compiler and that occasionally destroyed
the FAT.
Sorry Stuff, ain't so.
Bob Wallace wrote the Microsoft Pascal compiler, while he was at
Microsoft. He was their tenth employee. He told me that their runtime
library (which he didn't write) is buggy and slow.
So slow that it made benchmarks with their Fortran compiler (which also
used the buggy and slow runtime library), perform SLOWER than interpreted
BASIC.
But, it certainly did NOT do anything to the disk; certainly no messing
with the FAT.
If you had FAT corruption issues, perhaps you had SMARTDRV enabled with
write cacheing (which did occasionally mess up the FAT).
--
Grumpy Ol' Fred cisin(a)xenosoft.com