On 27/03/2008, Geoff Streeter <geoff@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote: > I am not as convinced about windows binary compatibility as David. You > can't run 16 bit binaries on any of the 64 bit versions of Windows. This > can be a curse for installers. It also broke when windows 3 was > introduced because windows wouldn't run the old PharLap extended DOS > programs. Or any DOS program that needed ring 0. I didn't say they were perfect and didn't eventually drop old interfaces :-) But they really do work very hard at backward compatibility - see Raymond Chen's blog "The Old New Thing": http://blogs.msdn.com/oldnewthing/ It's absolutely fascinating reading for anyone wondering why Windows and the Win32 API do some of the things they do, and what they need to do to get old apps working (and why the MSDN description of the interface is far from the whole story). - d.
