Assembly or ....

[Dave Martindale]

In article <189 at ernie.NECAM.COM> koll at ernie.NECAM.COM (Michael Goldman) writes:
>
>There is also the question of what happens when a new machine (like the
>IBM PC or MAC, or whatever) comes out and the C compilers for it are
>late or terribly buggy, or soooooooooo slow, and there are few if
>any utility packages for it ?
>
>Only in the academic world can code be written to be 100% machine
>independent.  The rest of us have to struggle with those little quirks
>of the chips.

Hmm.  Is it only in the academic world that the system (hardware and
software) is chosen for its benefit to the programmer or user?

I think that most people choose hardware and software for its
usefulness to them.  If a particular piece of hardware has too many
"quirks" to be useful, we don't buy it.  So we can write code that is
100% portable (not necessarily the same thing as machine independent)
to all of the machines that we consider sufficiently non-brain-damaged
to be useful to us.

I'll suggest that it's primarily people who write software to sell that
have to deal with new hardware that doesn't yet have decent compilers.
You aren't buying the hardware to use it, but to write stuff to sell to
others who use it, and are thus forced to put up with whatever state
it is in.  The "software vendor" view of the world is at least as narrow
as that of the "academic" view, and certainly not representative of
all non-academic users.

"The rest of us" are end users, who don't have to touch such hardware
if we don't want to.