22 Dec
2006
22 Dec
'06
9:24 a.m.
Oh, that's another thing - is there a correct
convention for track numbering?
There seem to be equal numbers of apps out there which treat the first track
as track zero as there are which treat it as track one :-) (Personal
preference would be to number from zero, just because it likely makes some
programming calculations easier, but I'm not sure if it's technically wrong to
present that visually to the user...)
I'm not sure there is a correct convention. I do know that controller
programming can be a bit weird. The old AT-style controllers on PCs
seemed to want the cylinders and heads numbered from 0 and the
sectors numbered from 1. I don't have any hardware docs with
me at the moment, but that's what I've seen in drivers. As an aside,
it's fun to try to explain to a class who've only seen sanitized classroom
examples that the real world is filled with stuff like this. That's why
I like to teach OS with code, and not just general principles.
BLS