Re: [AD] Prefixing (was: rest and yield_timeslice)

["Chris La Mantia" <celamantia@xxxxxxxxxx>]

From: "Angelo Mottola" <a.mottola@xxxxxxxxxx>

> What stops Allegro from being developed further is the fear to cut with
> the past (among other things). As Elias said, Allegro needs to change
> to reflect newer developer needs; let's face it, the DOS era ended a
> lot of time ago, and Allegro has struggled so far to be backward
> compatible. This forced compatibility has led gradually to bad API
> decisions, hacks and whatever was needed to ensure old DOS programs to
> compile on modern OSes. Actually, we were forcing developers
> (developing under modern OSes and not under DOS anymore) to think in
> DOS terms, in a world where now windowed environments, multitasking,
> OpenGL and hardware acceleration rule.

Uh, oh... I hope this isn't another "Let's abandon DOS" push.  We're
supporting BeOS, and I'm willing to bet there are far more DOS machines in
use than BeOS machines.  Of course, my main project
(http://webpages.charter.net/celamantia/jukebox) is a DOS project, so I'm
biased, and I'm active in the emulation cabinet community, where DOS
machines are quite common. If people wanted to use object oriented,
windowed, multitasking, accellerated environments... well, why not just use
DirectX then and be done with it?  (That oughta bring the "I hate Microsoft"
people out of the woodwork, huh?)

For a games library, the biggest desirable thing in that list is the
accelleration, but that's not necessarily incompatible with DOS; doesn't
AllegroGL run on DOS?

We should, of course, feel free to extend Allegro into new areas, and if
some of those areas leave DOS behind we could rightly say "that feature is
Windows only"... but I don't see any point in abandoning DOS while
continuing to support BeOS...

--Chris