MRC%PANDA@sumex-aim.stanford.edu (Mark Crispin) (01/06/87)
Some of you may be interested to know that the C palindromes compile
and execute correctly with the DEC-20 C compiler, although there are
periodic warnings about nested comments during compilation (I think the
authors of the compiler thought it would be a useful feature to warn
about this). So they are good examples of portable code. The byte sizes
given of the programs with newlines were off by one for each newline, since
a DEC-20 ASCII file uses CRLF to express newline, not bare LF like Unix.
So they are good examples of portable code.
The usual way in which people writing C code lose with machine
independence is in having code that assumes that a byte, a small integer,
a pointer, and an address all have the same representation and are
interchangable. One really awful dependency happened in Unix Logo; it
had code which knew in which direction machine stacks grew in memory!
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