Micro$oft Biz'droid Lusers (was: OT email response format)

From: ajp166 <ajp166_at_bellatlantic.net>
Date: Sun Apr 21 20:56:53 2002

From: Sean 'Captain Napalm' Conner <spc_at_conman.org>
>> 8080/z80 and if it was DOS you could bet on 808x. Unix back then
meant
>> MIPS, VAX, PDP-11, SUN/sparc, 68000, Z8000, and a few dozen I likely
missed.
>
> That doesn't make sense. UNIX you state as being easily ported, even
>though as a kernel it has to hit the hardware pretty hard, yet you state
>applications as not being portable at all, because of the underlying
>hardware and processor (which the application shouldn't care about). If
>anything, I would think the opposite would be true.


You forget I guess. All cpus are from intel. At one time unix was on
machines
of different word size and instruction set. So an app while easily
ported to a new
platform, it was not without some problems. Like each version of unix
was not
always the same as another. Some of those were those little things like
the apps programmer needed a target machine and OS to verify on. So
"portable" is not
the same as "ported to".

> Now, speaking as a programmer who's done cross platform programs, I've
>come to the conclusion that writing portable software isn't difficult
and
>with enough experience it becomes quite easy in fact. It's programmers
that
>make unwarrented assumptions about their code or platform that make for
>unportable applications.


I didn't say it wasn't possible only that saying the OS is unix meant it
was
not always a slam dunk and that compliation was often required.

> Granted, on the 8-bit systems you often times had to code in Assembly,
>both for speed and size reasons (and because compilers for such systems
>weren't good enough) but when you get to UNIX the whole point was to
avoid
>assembly in the first place [1]. Therefore, you are writing in a higher
>level, more portable language and then it becomes possible to write code
>that will run across platforms. Heck, I've written a program that has
>compiled across several different UNIX platforms (SGI, Linux on the x86,
>Linux on the DEC Alpha, OpenBSD, FreeBSD) without problems [2] and
you'll
>notice that there is at least one 64-bit architecture listed there. The
>same code was successfully compiled (with one line of code change, plus
a
>few other lines to get the correct header files loaded) under Microsoft
>Windows. Okay, it may not have been optimum code under Windows, but it
>still ran with minimum of changes or fuss.


Thanks for the tutorial, I heard it back it 82 also. Experence however
proved
otherwise in practical terms.

>[2] Okay, one problem---the DEC Alpha port crashed, but it was tracked
> down to a bug in the C library call memchr().


In the past 1983-1988 that was far more commonplace to have incompatable
compilers libraries.

Allison
Received on Sun Apr 21 2002 - 20:56:53 BST