[PaulHoule]

Personally I enjoyed writing assembly with segments. You can have 64k of code, 64k of data and 64k of stack without trying. So long as no individual data structure is larger than 64k there is no essential difficulty working with 16 bit pointers.

When I think back I think it would be fun to have a hierarchical structure where composite data structures (think an array or hash map) are referred to with a pointer that goes into the segment register and you index inside a data structure with a regular pointer.

[trollbridge]

Lots of 8086 code was written that way. You’d use the segment register on paragraph alignment and basically take advantage of the << 4 + logic.

This code was a nightmare to port to protected mode 80286 so it went away by the Windows 3.1 era.