Machine-independent intermediate languages

[Doug Gwyn]

In article <10037 at socslgw.csl.sony.JUNET> diamond at csl.sony.JUNET (Norman Diamond) writes:
>The phrase "portable assembler" is unfortunately ambiguous.  This has
>led users to expect C PROGRAMS to be as portable as the language's
>SYNTAX.  Since their demands have been listened to, C is losing its
>original capabilities.

I'm not aware of any capabilities that have been lost.

>Anyone who wants to write portable PROGRAMS should use another language.

I have to take strong exception to this.  C probably offers more support
for writing significant portable programs than any other language.  It
has a nice balance of standardization and flexible accommodation of
variant machine architectures and environments.