At 01:20 PM 16/09/2002 -0500, Jeffrey Sharp wrote:
On Monday, September 16, 2002, Tom Uban wrote:
Hmm. Well I would actually guess that while C (in which the assembler is
already written) is not quite as portable as Perl (from the it runs
without modification standpoint), there are probably more C
implementations than there are Perl, for a wider variety of machines.
You know, you're right. There's no reason to use anything other than
standard C and its library. It's a fancy assembler that needs anything more
than that.
The main issue is that whilst there are lots of C implementations (which
allows for
portability) the fact that lots of people write very non-portable C is bad. The
real killer (from personal experience) are those programmers who think
sizeof(int) == sizeof(*int). This breaks lots of "portable" code when moving
away from a typical 32bit machine (especially to alpha).
Huw Davies | e-mail: Huw.Davies(a)kerberos.davies.net.au
| "If God had wanted soccer played in the
| air, the sky would be painted green"