peter@ficc.ferranti.com (Peter da Silva) (07/16/90)
In article <RANG.90Jul13220207@derby.cs.wisc.edu> rang@cs.wisc.edu (Anton Rang) writes: > Portability is something which is not especially important most of > the time; on the other hand, it's rather difficult to write > non-portable code in many languages (C being one notable exception, > and of course any code using system routines or run-time libraries is > non-portable as well). You have to work at it, a bit. Well, it seems no two Modula-2 compilers have the same set of run-time libraries for I/O. Then there's Fortran, which is so constrained to the fixed-format card-image world that to do anything interesting with it from the point of view of the user interface you pretty much have to go right to the system. Pascal, of course, is aother case where a limited base standard has led to the use of massive numbers of non-portable extensions. Forth is a sitting duck, so I won't take a shot at it. ADA hasn't been around long enough to tell one way or the other, but I understand a lot of the DoD ADA code has become dependent on VRTX. To sum it up, I can't think of a single language in which it is the slightest bit difficult to write non-portable code. -- Peter da Silva. `-_-' +1 713 274 5180. <peter@ficc.ferranti.com>
gast@lanai.cs.ucla.edu (David Gast) (07/24/90)
In <YFP4SI@xds13.ferranti.com> peter@ficc.ferranti.com (Peter da Silva) writes: >In <RANG.90Jul13220207@derby.cs.wisc.edu> rang@cs.wisc.edu (Anton Rang) writes: >> Portability is something which is not especially important most of the time; >To sum it up, I can't think of a single language in which it is the slightest >bit difficult to write non-portable code. Your're not thinking of Algol 68. (There are no smileys because I am serious). David Gast gast@cs.ucla.edu {uunet,ucbvax,rutgers}!{ucla-cs,cs.ucla.edu}!gast