Imlac assembler almost ready...

From: Huw Davies <Huw.Davies_at_kerberos.davies.net.au>
Date: Mon Sep 16 19:51:00 2002

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_at_kerberos.davies.net.au
                      | "If God had wanted soccer played in the
                      | air, the sky would be painted green"
Received on Mon Sep 16 2002 - 19:51:00 BST