Ronald Natalie scripsit:

> Hard to believe the 8086 chip was “optimized” for anything.
> The instruction set was designed for programming terminals.

Well, yes.  But the four separate address spaces work fine for Pascal,
where it is always statically known whether a pointer is to code,
global data, the stack (internal only), or the heap.  For C they were
nothing but a nuisance:  C can handle separate I & D space, but that's all.

-- 
John Cowan          http://www.ccil.org/~cowan        cowan at ccil.org
What asininity could I have uttered that they applaud me thus?
        --Phocion, Greek orator