GENERAL WARNING

[Michael Pilling The phantom of the Milk Bar]

ralph at laas.fr (Ralph P. Sobek) writes:

>In article <1548 at atlas.tegra.COM> vail at tegra.COM (Johnathan Vail) writes:
>| 
>|    Two years ago when I was working at DG it was still in AOS.  Typing
>|    `xyzzy' at the prompt returned "Nothing happens".

>It's amazing that pieces of the the old `adventure' game are floating
>around in OS's!  In the Adventure dungeon, if you typed `xyzzy' at
>some inappropriate moment, the game would respond with `Nothing
>happens'!

It's probably still there too!
DG did such a good job of simulating 16 bit AOS in 32 bit AOS/VS with
call translation within the agent that it never really bothered rewritting
most of the CLI, but left it in 16 bit assembler.
Strangely enough, xyzzy was a very useful command for debugging and a safe
way of putting in a must fill this code in reminder.
Also, xyzzy was implemented somewhere outside the general parser,
as if you give it any arguments or switches it returns the
error
NOT A COMMAND OR MACRO
unlike all other builtins which will say UNKNOWN SWITCH or UNEXPECTED ARGUMENT.

Michael
--
 _--_|\  Michael John Pilling,		 bigm at batserver.cs.uq.oz.au
/      \ Computer Science Department,    She was pregnant and, unfortunately,
\_.--._/ University of Queensland,	 the serious bruise to her back
      v  Queensland, 4072 Australia.     prompted her to abort.[Daily Sun]