Portal:Amiga/Selected article/13

AmigaDOS is the disk operating system of the AmigaOS, which includes file systems, file and directory manipulation, the command-line interface, and file redirection.

In AmigaOS 1.x, AmigaDOS was based on a TRIPOS port by MetaComCo, written in BCPL. BCPL does not use native pointers, so the more advanced functionality of the operating system was difficult to use and error-prone. The third-party AmigaDOS Resource Project (ARP, formerly the AmigaDOS Replacement Project), a project begun by Amiga developer Charlie Heath, replaced many of the BCPL utilities with smaller, more sophisticated equivalents written in C and assembler, and provided a wrapper library, arp.library. This 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. (Full article...)