Two Birds with One Stone

[COTTRELL, JAMES]

/*
> Look, those of you who are new to this discussion: it has already
> been incontrovertibly shown that cottrell at nbs is one of those
> irremediably brain-damaged people who think that all computers
> should look like VAXen.

Yes. Reasonable. It is not the only one. There are others.

> He's even shown VMS-loving tendencies.

I hate VMS. What are you talking about?

> So, let's not waste net time trying to shout him down, eh?
> ;-);-);-);-);-);-);-);-);-);-);-);-);-);-);-);-);-);-);-);-);-);-);-)
> Jim, if you want to flame me, let's do it privately, eh?

But it's OK for you to insult me publicly, eh? GFY.

> 
> 	Joe Yao		hadron!jsdy at seismo.{CSS.GOV,ARPA,UUCP}

> > [ME] ...Portability to lesser machines should be done *by the porter*.
> > That's why they call it porting. After all, this is still easier to do than
> > rewriting the program.
> > 
> > I can live with the new ANSI C recasting all my parameters for me.
> > I refuse to cast parameters to the `correct' type. And I refuse to
> > work on any machine where I need to. You want it, you fix it.
> 
> Translated, what this says is "I don't care whether my programs are
> portable, so long as they run on the machines I care about right now".
> -- 
> 				Henry Spencer @ U of Toronto Zoology
> 				{allegra,ihnp4,linus,decvax}!utzoo!henry

Exactly. Listen folx, I'm getting sick of this righteous attitude toward
my opinions on portability. If I was rich, I would design a machine that
had 11 bit characters, 19 bit shorts, 37 bit ints, and 51 bit longs.
It would be base 3, middle endian; floating point would be BCD exponents
with EBCDIC mantissas. I'd love to see X3J11 try & be portable with that.

If you don't like my opinions, fine. But you don't have to insult me.
Any fool can do that. There are a whole lot worse & uninformed opinions
on this network. Just for a moment step outside your way of looking at
things and consider what if it was my way. Do you *really* enjoy 
contorting your code so that it will run on every conceivable machine?
Who TF gave INTEL permission to create the abominable notion of 
segments? And who TF gave some joker permission to create a compiler
with `small-model' & `large-model' concepts? Absurd! More forgivable
mistakes were non-byte addressible 16 bit minis. But who would seriously
consider anything but an 8 bit byte with ASCII as the native character
set (except IBM or their lookalikes) today? The future is now.
Don't wallow in the past. Throw out your Z80's etc. Bring out your dead.

	jim		cottrell at nbs
*/
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