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As I have seen too many times to be surprised now, the source code and setup in assembly is much easier in asm than in higher level languages. Look for ”COM programming with assembler” if you are curious. No casting, no bullshit. Just numbers pushed around :)

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I dunno. The massive amount of comments necessary to make this code remotely understandable is pretty telling.

And in one file there was a magic number #1536 or something, never got explained.

Oof, that would have been hard. ;)

More seriously, the "rule against magic constants" makes sense in many circumstances, but there are limits.

Explanation in the form of breadcrumbs:

1. https://github.com/kliment/Printrun/issues/619#issuecomment-...

then

2. https://github.com/gnustep/libs-corebase/blob/master/Headers...

It's more explaining how the whole OS X application model works than the code itself.

Okay, I got curious, but unfortunately that exact book title doesn't seem to exist.

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