Portability as prime directive.

[Peter da Silva]

> >testing, the portability of code.  Yes, in the long run, it is maybe
> >worthwhile, but often it falls into the same category as generalising your
> >code as opposed to making it specific - a good thing to do, but often
> >commercially/practically unjustified.
> 
> Astounding! I guess you have a right to your opinion, what company do
> you work for and exactly what processor is your code tied to so I know
> exactly when to sell short on your stock?

If you're writing code to support some (net.)bizarre harware, or for some very
specific purpose, who cares if it's portable. For instance, the project I'm
working on now is an emulator for an obsolete *hardware* protocol so we can
actually test some of the remote units we've inherited from a defunct company.
The only place this code is going to be used is on a laptop-portable IBM-PC
clone at one site. Who cares if it becomes obsolete (poor term: a given SW/HW
combination does not become obsolete until it can no longer perform the service
it was designed for, but there you have it) in 6 years? We're never going to
have to upgrade it.

On the other hand my process control language compiler has to be portable to
just about any hardware and software, so it's written as an operator/precedence
parser with a nice clean symbol-table interface so I can even port it to
FORTRAN/EBCDIC if I need to.

Just look at the priorities for each program, and make your decisions based on
each individual case. That's all.