[AshamedCaptain]

I think you are missing the entire point of the article (which I kinda agree with), and just repeating the popular wisdom.

In the era a machine with "object addressing" sounded like a perfectly valid futuristic design (what a Lisp machine strived to be; I guess today you would call it tagged memory of some kind). The 8086 is not that, but the original design would have allowed to evolve it into something like that.

The article's point is that since programmers simply treated it as a sliding window (instead of an opaque object handle), the plan could not be implemented, and the half-assed thing became stuck.

Having seen other Intel RISC designs, I fully agree with the premise.

[AnimalMuppet]

But with only four segment registers, you couldn't treat it as that - not unless you only had four objects. So treating it as a sliding window was all you actually could do with it.

[bonzini]

With 6-7 general purpose registers you could have; since anyway only three of them were usable for addressing you constantly had to load from memory. just use MOV ES instead of MOV BX to load a pointer and you actually got to increase your GPRs by one or two. Nobody did it except for larger memory areas which were allocated using farmalloc() or the INT 21h allocator.

[peterfirefly]

I remember that at some point compiler ads would brag that the new "Microland" compiler could do "segment pointers" where only the segment was stored. I don't remember when it was, but it was fairly late in the DOS era.

In retrospect, they seem so useful and obvious but apparently not. I guess the type of person who thinks near/far/huge is extremely complicated found segment pointers even more complicated.

[trollbridge]

x86 has 7 general purpose registers.

Using a bare segment register as a pointer was quite common. That’s what the DOS memory allocation call would return.

[AshamedCaptain]

That's almost like saying that with 2 registers you can only do additions with 2 operands. True, but missing the picture. The number of segments is not limited by the number of segment registers, or even (gasp!) by the number of segment descriptors.