Portability and the Ivory Tower (was Re: Book on Microsoft C)

[Henry Spencer]

In article <42674c5e.b11a at falcon.engin.umich.edu> ejd at caen.engin.umich.edu (Edward J Driscoll) writes:
>... Backwards compatibility does not imply crippling future
>applications.  That your 80286 can run 8086 software does not seem
>to have crippled it from running system III Unix...

*All* the xxx86 processors, with the arguable exception of the 386, are
crippled for reasonable programming by backward compatibility with the
8080, which was hurt by backward compatibility with the 8008.  Intel
are the world champions at being backward compatible with all previous
mistakes.

Try timing a program which uses an array bigger than 64KB if you want
to see what I mean.
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