Computers and heat density

Idiot? Perhaps the code was just written for Unix. I've written plenty of code with no attempt to make it portable to non-Unix, or non-SPARC, or non-VMS, or non-32-bit, or non-whatever. Does that make me an idiot? Well, perhaps, if such portability should have been designed in, but absent such a reason, I don't think so. Not for suitable values of "portable". I really can't see it as a fault of C if code not written to be portable to non-Unix is not portable to non-Unix. (It may be a fault of the programmer, if porting attempts to non-Unix were reasonably to be expected, but even then it wouldn't be the fault of the *language*.) C co-evolved with Unix. I don't see this as a failing of the language; I see it as a failing of people who not only try to use C on non-Unix but then proceed to blame C for the inevitable mismatch. Whatever is necessary to refer to c[52]. By definition. If char is smaller than the machine's addressing granularity, a pointer-to-char is - must be! - more complicated than a simple memory address. Figuring out how to handle/avoid such things is part of building a C implementation for an architecture. Portable, well, perhaps, if you write in an old enough dialect. (Though, again, "portable" immediately raises the question "to what?".) Nice? Not really, unless you're doing heavy numerical code. That's what FORTRAN was designed for and what it shines at. Like most languages, it fares rather badly outside its design domain. Quite possibly, provided you don't drop Unix in your counterfactual too. /~\ The ASCII der Mouse \ / Ribbon Campaign X Against HTML mouse at rodents.montreal.qc.ca / \ Email! 7D C8 61 52 5D E7 2D 39 4E F1 31 3E E8 B3 27 4B