#: 5394 S15/Hot Topics
    20-Jul-90  23:40:08
Sb: #5068-#Is Basic out of date?
Fm: Mike Knudsen 72467,1111
To: Mark Wuest 74030,332

You are dead right about wild C pointers, and how amazingly you can get away
for years and never know you've got a funny pointer, because there just happens
to be nobody else using the few bytes of memory that it stores a line of
keyboard input into, or whatever.

However, Basic09 and Basic can blow up any system too, using POKE with an
argument that didn't get initialized right.  I've written RSBASIC programs that
built up binary-byte arrays, requiring POKE, and I could have blown that too.

Yes, memory protection hardware is great for catching wild stuff. But it also
may keep you from reading system variables, writing directly to I/O devices,
and other things that we "shouldn't" be doing, but sometimes you have to for
speed.  I hope we don't have to on the MM/1.  --mike k.

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