Machines for testing portability (was Re: "Numerical Recipes in C" is nonportable code)
David Collier-Brown
daveb at geac.UUCP
Fri Sep 2 22:27:39 AEST 1988
>>In article <1673 at dataio.Data-IO.COM> bright at dataio.Data-IO.COM (Walter Bright) writes:
>>: The best way to learn to write portable code is to be required to port
>>: your applications to Vaxes, 68000s, and PCs. (I have all 3 on my desk!)
>From article <795 at ns.UUCP>, by ddb at ns.UUCP (David Dyer-Bennet):
> No portability check is complete until you've tried some word-oriented
> rather than byte-oriented system. Preferrably something with a word-size
> not a multiple of 8 bits (like 60, or 36). CDC, Unisys, Honeywell, and of
> course the DEC PDP-10 series all come to mind.
Actually the 9-bit byte machines are fairly easy to port to: all
sorts of code of varying quality will run on the Honeywell-Bull
DPS-8 using the Waterloo C Compiler. Try a machine with funny
pointer lengths like the DPS-6, though... Its an 8-bit byte, but
char pointers are 48 bits and others are 32, if you use to high an
address the system will trap even loading a register, etc, etc.
--dave (Bell labs had a DPS-8 C compiler many moons ago) c-b
--
David Collier-Brown. |{yunexus,utgpu}!geac!lethe!dave
78 Hillcrest Ave,. | He's so smart he's dumb.
Willowdale, Ontario. | --Joyce C-B
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