Architectural diversity - was Re: Pair of Twiggys

[Bill Gunshannon]

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From: cctalk [cctalk-bounces at classiccmp.org] on behalf of Chuck Guzis via cctalk [cctalk at classiccmp.org]
Sent: Thursday, March 16, 2017 6:08 PM
To: General Discussion: On-Topic and Off-Topic Posts
Subject: Re: Architectural diversity - was Re: Pair of Twiggys

On 03/16/2017 02:54 PM, Ethan Dicks via cctalk wrote:
> On Thu, Mar 16, 2017 at 5:42 PM, Cameron Kaiser via cctalk
> <cctalk at classiccmp.org> wrote:
>>> Porting to diverse architectures is still a great way to find
>>> latent bugs.
>>
>> Too bad people can't be arsed to port merely to diverse *operating
>> systems*, let alone architectures.
>
> I'm one of the folks that works on LCDproc.  Part of the release
> testing I do is to compile it on things that aren't just "yet
> another Linux box".  Of all the use-cases, I'm pretty sure that it's
> going to work on Debian-flavored things and if that ever breaks, it's
> going to be the one thing that gets fixed first.

Sadly (or happily--take your choice), architectures aren't nearly as
diverse as they used to be.  Ones complement, decimal, six-bit characters...

And people who weren't there can't understand why FORTRAN was the
closest thing to a "portable" language...

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Not even close to COBOL.  :-)

bill