Docstrings considered too complicated

[Albert van der Horst]

In article <hmlvas$2a6$1 at reader1.panix.com>,
Grant Edwards  <invalid at invalid.invalid> wrote:
>On 2010-03-03, Grant Edwards <invalid at invalid.invalid> wrote:
>> On 2010-03-03, Gregory Ewing <greg.ewing at canterbury.ac.nz> wrote:
>>> Grant Edwards wrote:
>>>
>>>> Just a mediocre copy of the CP/M filesystem, which was in turn
>>>> copied from DEC's RSTS or RSX.
>>>
>>> It was actually an improvement over CP/M's file system. CP/M
>>> didn't have hierarchical directories
>>
>> Neither did the original MS-DOS filesystem.
>>
>>> or timestamps and recorded file sizes in 128-byte blocks
>>> rather than bytes.
>>
>> I thought that was true of the original MS-DOS filesystem as
>> well, but I wouldn't bet money on it.
>
>I definitely remember that old MS-DOS programs would treat
>Ctrl-Z as an EOF marker when it was read from a text file and
>would terminate a text file with a Ctrl-Z when writing one.
>
>I don't know if that was because the underlying filesystem was
>still did everything in blocks or if it was because those
>MS-DOS programs were direct ports of CP/M programs.  I would
>have sworn that the orignal MS-DOS file API was FCB based and
>worked almost exactly like CP/M.  IIRC, the "byte stream" API
>showed up (in the OS) sever versions later.  The byte stream
>API was implemented by many compiler vendor's C libraries on
>top of the block-oriented FCB API.

My programming reference manual for MSDOS 6.0 (1993)
states the FCB stuff as "superseded" (not obsolete or obsolescent).
It states:
"A programmer should not use a superseded function except to
maintain compatibility with versions of MS-DOS earlier than
version 2.0."

FCB did *not* support paths, but you could access the current
directory.

>--
>Grant Edwards               grant.b.edwards        Yow! I had a lease on an

Groetjes Albert

--
-- 
Albert van der Horst, UTRECHT,THE NETHERLANDS
Economic growth -- being exponential -- ultimately falters.
albert at spe&ar&c.xs4all.nl &=n http://home.hccnet.nl/a.w.m.van.der.horst