Impressed

[Paulo Pinto]

On Sunday, 29 July 2012 at 22:22:33 UTC, Walter Bright wrote:
> On 7/27/2012 7:38 PM, Jonathan M Davis wrote:
>> True, but I'm kind of shocked that anything 16-bit even still 
>> exists. _32-bit_
>> is on its way out. I thought that 16-bit was dead _years_ ago. 
>> I guess that
>> some embedded stuff must use it. But really, I wouldn't expect 
>> the lack of 16-
>> bit support to be much of an impediment - if any at all - and 
>> in the long run,
>> it'll mean absolutely nothing.
>
> For those who may not realize it, C++ is simply not suitable 
> for 16 bit systems either. It theoretically supports 16 bit 
> code, but in practice, full C++ will never work on them.
>
> So, you might ask, why was 16 bit C++ popular on 16 bit MSDOS 
> in the 80's? That was C++ before exception handling and RTTI, 
> both of which were unimplementable on 16 bit machines. (Yes, 
> you could do it, but the result was practically unusable.)

I remember using both features with Borland compilers.

But then I was around 16 years old and was not doing anything 
serious
with C++, besides getting to know the language.

On those days, Turbo Pascal was my number one choice for serious 
software.

>
> C and 16 bits go reasonably well together, but even so, the 
> best programs were written all in asm.