The Old New Thing

Why is the LOADPARMS32 structure so messed up?

July 7, 2008 Jul 7, 2008 07/7/08

Raymond Chen

If you look at the LOADPARMS32 structure, you'll find a horrific mishmash. Double-null-terminated strings, a null-terminated string, some WORDs, and even a Pascal-style string. What's going on here? Each of those members comes from a different era in time. The oldest member is the Pascal-style command line, which dates back to CP/M. On CP/...