A86: Large ASM
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A86: Large ASM
This Patrick Wong guy is up to it AGAIN...
Anyway, this is yet another email regarding Patrick Wong's
(pwong0124@hotmail.com) latest shell, Large ASM, which supposedly supports
executing programs up to 32k in size. Although that's a very nice concept,
I'd like to discourage anybody from supporting this incompatible format for a
number of reasons:
1. It states support up to 32k, but in fact any program exceeding 16k in
size cannot access ANY rom calls.
2. If you wanted to send the program to another calc, you would have to
RESET IT! Large ASM requires certain programs to be in specific locations of
memory, which makes distribution essentially impossible.
3. His "solution" to accidentally executing large programs with Asm( --
having the first opcode be a "ret" -- is entirely ineffective because any
program exceeding 9000 bytes in size will overwrite the stack and instantly
crash.
4. The "feature" where it automatically writes back all data renders
compression such as lite86 useless, meaning that "large" programs would be
made 20-40% larger just by using the technology.
Currently the TI-86 is the ONLY ti calculator not requiring a shell to run
any asm program. In my opinion, this is a beautiful thing, because there
needs to be only one version of every program released rather than a dozen
ports; also, old programs don't have to constantly be converted to the latest
and greatest shell that just came out. No programs are left behind. If we
all stick with standards, things will remain that way. Yet Patrick Wong
wants to take all that away from you just because he doesn't feel like
storing data in a string.
----
Jonah Cohen
<ComAsYuAre@aol.com>
http://jonah.ticalc.org
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