questions from using lint

[M.F.C.F. Operators]

In article <453 at brl-smoke.ARPA> rbj at icst-cmr (Root Boy Jim) writes:
>Most of the code I have written was intrinsically non-portable. I *do*
>appreciate portability as a spectrum concept, but not as a binary one.

Good point.  There seems to be a lot of people confusing "portability"
and "machine-independance".  Some years ago Malcolm and Rogers defined
a measure they called the "portability index" of a program

               cost to modify the existing code for new environment
      index = -----------------------------------------------------
                Cost to recode from scratch an equivalent program

Where "cost" is appropriate function for your environment
time, money etc.
A machine independant program would have a portabily index of 0.