17 Sep
2002
17 Sep
'02
2:58 a.m.
Huw Davies wrote:
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).
Or 16 bit code to a 32
bit machine.
BTW FORTRAN was fairly portiable in its day. Not easy to program in
for text based operations like cross assemblers but many cpu's in the
1970's has cross-compilers and cross-assemblers written for them in
FORTRAN. It is the fact that computers DON'T have a front panel that
really makes OLD FORTRAN a pain to port for SENSE switch opertations.