Imlac assembler almost ready...

From: Huw Davies <Huw.Davies_at_kerberos.davies.net.au>
Date: Wed Sep 18 08:00:00 2002

At 08:54 AM 17/09/2002 -0600, Ben Franchuk wrote:
>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.

I wasn't going to mention that but perhaps I should have. There were lots
of problems migrating
code written on Unix running on PDP-11s to VAXes (and other 32 bit
systems). You'd have thought
that this would have triggered the mindset of programmers not to make
unnecessary architectural dependencies when writing code but obviously not.

"He who ignores history is destined to repeat it" rings true here.

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 Wed Sep 18 2002 - 08:00:00 BST