AmigaDOS

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AmigaDOS provides the disk operating system portion of the AmigaOS. This includes file systems, file and directory manipulation, the command line interface, file redirection and so on.

In AmigaOS 1.x, the AmigaDOS portion was based on a TRIPOS port by MetaComCo, written in BCPL. Because BCPL does not use native pointers, as do C and most other low-level programming languages and assembler programs, using more advanced functionality of the operating system was difficult and prone to errors. The third-party AmigaDOS Resource Project[1] (ARP, formerly the AmigaDOS Replacement Project[2]), a project begun by Amiga developer Charlie Heath, replaced many of the BCPL utilities with smaller and often more sophisticated equivalents written in C and assembler, and provided a wrapper library, arp.library, which eliminated the interfacing problems in applications by automatically performing conversions from native pointers (such as those used by C or assembler) to BCPL equivalents and vice versa for all AmigaDOS functions.

From AmigaOS 2.x onwards, AmigaDOS was rewritten in C, retaining 1.x compatibility where possible.

[edit] References

  1. ^ http://uk.aminet.net/misc/antiq/ARP_13.readme
  2. ^ ARP is referred to as the AmigaDOS Replacement Project in ARP version 1.1's arpbase.h, available from ftp://ftp.funet.fi/pub/amiga/ancient/ex-amiga-s/archive/
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