30 Aug
2006
30 Aug
'06
11:04 a.m.
>Some of the CP/M tools used $ as a string
terminator, if I'm remembering
>right...
On Wed, 30 Aug 2006, Chuck Guzis wrote:
Actually, it's BDOS call 9--preserved to this day
in MS-DOS/Windoze. I've
no idea why a printable character was selected as a terminator. Anyone
have any idea of its origin?
IIRC, I saw an interview long ago, (maybe when Gary Kildall was the
co-host with Jim Warren of Computer Chronicles?), in which Gary
APOLOGIZED for that, and said that it had been a temporary kludge,
and hadn't originally been meant to be permanent.
For their first assignment, I have my assembly language students write a
program to display their name AND the price that they paid for the
textbook (to force use of function 2, instead of 9). We then use creating
their own puts() function to get into jumps, conditional jumps, and loops.
--
Grumpy Ol' Fred cisin at xenosoft.com