andrew clarke wrote in a message to Jasen Betts:

 ac> These days I'd discourage anyone to learn C in a DOS environment 
 ac> just because there's basically no memory protection when your 
 ac> program runs amok, eg. a buffer overrun in your program could 
 ac> easily lock your machine even if you're running the program in a
 ac> DOS Window under Win9x/ME (on the other hand WinNT/2K/XP are almost
 ac> bulletproof in this regard).

That's not the only reason.  Back around the time I first started reading
this echo I was still running cp/m,  though most folks had by that time
moved to dos.  What c programs I was considering were fairly small and
simple for the most part.  And the amount of "stuff" that was
_needed_ in most cases was amazing.  You had to detect what sort of video
card was in the machine,  and whether the user was running mono or color, 
and cope with that.  I still bump into software that doesn't deal with that
very well,  or with me running in 50-line mode -- it seems to assume that
there's only 25 lines,  and looks real funny.  Stuff like that.

OTOH,  I have *no* idea how one deals with some of these issues under
linux,  but again,  I don't have to worry about it for the most part at
this stage of any programming I might want to do.

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