Re: "Ivy League"

Ned Deily <nad@xxxxxxxx> wrote in
news:nad-29C444.23092116122008@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx:

JedD:
DavidF:
And Windows programs don't? Mac programs have an advantage in
that Apple revs their OS every few years to break all the older
programs so that developers have to rewrite them to the new API.

Bzzzt! Sorry, David, you're really out of your sphere of
expertise on this.

Apple has broken backward compatibility twice in the last 20 years.
Microsoft has not done it once since the early 80s. I have a client
running a dBase II app compiled in 1983 on a WinXP machine (with no
special tweaks except to support printing to a USB printer, and
that's handled by the compatibility settings for the DOS prompt the
app is launched in). Dunno if it would run on Vista without tweaks,
though.

Tell you what: I won't make pronouncements about Windows if you
don't on Mac OSes. I do reserve the right to make silly
statements about 32' reeds, though.

I was offering an explanation of one reason why Mac software is
going to be more consistent than Windows software, i.e., because the
older software won't run on the current OS X.

AIUI, the Macintosh System Software before OS X was, by and large,
backwards binary compatible all the way to the beginning (and, as
I dimly recall from back when I cared, there was a nontrivial
amount of gunk in the later days to support mixed-mode PPC/68k
stuff). Even with the OS X break and the Intel break, there's
still a modicum of source-level compatibility with Carbon (to the
extent that, last I looked, there was a special magic filesystem
to let user-level code access files by volume ID and file ID, to
support the ancient HFS-centric FSSpec stuff).

There is that and, of course, most Mac OS programs - from the
early '80s on - still run on recent hardware via Classic through
the previous release of OS X, 10.4 aka Tiger, which is still being
actively maintained.

Apps that don't need any kind of interface with hardware may work
under Classic, but lots of apps break now. Or, at least, so the Mac
users of Finale report.

--
David W. Fenton http://www.dfenton.com/
usenet at dfenton dot com http://www.dfenton.com/DFA/
.

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