Original from  Paul Edwards  to Denis Tonn on 10-17-1996
Original Subject: watcom and warp

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 PE> That's what I just said above, the files= only affects DOS 
 PE> programs under OS/2, not OS/2 programs under OS/2!  
 PE> Bizaare!  Let's hope they changed that with Merlin.  BFN.  
 PE> Paul.
 
 DT> Not bizarre at all.. The Dos FILES= statement affects a system wide 
 DT> limit. The applications still have to do some work to use more than 20
 DT> handles in the app itself 
 
PE> Ah!  Thankyou.  I'm not a DOS programmer, so didn't realise that, I thought 
PE> you could just do the open() call and you would get up to 
PE> whatever was specified in FILES=.

 Nope.. The PSP header in Dos only has room for 20 file handles. The 
application has to allocate an area of it's own and do an API call to 
tell Dos to use this new area for the handle table. Usually this is 
handled transparently (to the programmer) by the compiler runtime 
startup code. If you ever code in ASM, you become quite aware of this. 

PE> What call is this?  

 Sorry.. Don't remember and don't have the Dos Int21 calls here. It is
in the Dos tech reference or in one of the (many) Dos programming 
references around. 
 

   Denis       

 Certified OS/2 Engineer, Certified OS/2 Instructor, Certifiable....
 All opinions are my very own, IBM has no claim upon them
 
.
--- Maximus/2 3.01