ARTICLE - Why the MS Office file formats is so complicated

[Jon 'maddog' Hall]

>One of the original goals in Vista was to replace
>the legacy code still doing important stuff.  After struggling for two
>years, they *gave up*.

I can relate to that.  Digital, at one time, tried to eliminate one of
the arcane data addressing modes in the VAX architecture.  They checked
with all the DEC compiler groups, all the third party compiler companies
and even with the GNU, BSD and AT&T compiler groups, and none of these
compilers generated any instructions that would use that addressing
mode.

They were just about to make their changes to the chips (saving a lot of
silicon space and testing time when I mentioned assembly-language
programs that might use it.....oooopppssss....they found several
programs in the wild that did use that addressing mode...so they had to
maintain it.

And before people say "emulation", I remember that we considered
emulation, and emulating that particular addressing mode (and I can not
remember which one it was) would have been very ugly indeed.

(sigh)

md
-- 
Jon "maddog" Hall
Executive Director           Linux International(R)
email: maddog at li.org         80 Amherst St. 
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