From: rbs{at}snippets.org
To: c_echo{at}yahoogroups.com

On Mon, 1 Sep 2003, Kurt Kuzba wrote:

> * Author: andrew clarke
> AC>  These days I'd discourage anyone to learn C in a DOS
> AC>  environment just because there's basically no memory
> AC>  protection when your program runs amok, eg. a buffer
> AC>  overrun in your program could easily lock your machine
> AC>  even if you're running the program in a DOS Window under
> AC>  Win9x/ME
>
>  I still have my 486sx25 on which I compiled and ran a QC2.5
>  program which overran a string buffer.  It did a spontaneous
>  reboot, after executing the code to write from a memory buffer
>  to the CMOS.  My system came up without any hard drive info and
>  consequently couldn't boot at all.  That was an interesting
>  experience!  At least it didn't accidentally set a gibberish
>  password while it was about it.  I had to dig up the specs for
>  the hard drives, but everything was there once the system could
>  access them once again.  I've been very careful about
>  overstepping the bounds on my text ever since, oddly enough.

As much as you can deride DOS as a development environment, I always found
it helped train me to be a better, more careful programmer. Since it is so
unforgiving, you learn a lot more working in it than in more protected
environments. It's still in use in a lot of single board embedded systems
where it's perfectly suitable. Of course, I must admit that I do most of
my DOS code development these days under Win32...

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