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Ready to be corrected, as I haven't worked with DOS or Windows for decades, but I seem to recall ".com" is merely used for familiarity/compatibility and hasn't meant anything about the underlying format for a very long time now.

The Wikipedia page for .com suggests that 64 bit Windows NT+ systems can't run the original style .com files anymore due to lacking the MS-DOS emulation subsystem, so the point may be moot.



Already thirty years ago there were DOS executables with a .COM extension that weren't actually in the COM format. COMMAND.COM in later versions of DOS is an example.




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