long identifiers

[Bryan Morse]

Before this turns into a full blown UNIX vs. MS-DOS bash (inappropriate for
this newsgroup anyway), let me point out that the original poster used
in word "qualitative" in reference to portability, not "quality" in reference
to operating systems.  By this, I assume he meant portability in terms of
types of systems vs. (quantitative) portability in terms of number of systems.
In this regards, UNIX is indeed _qualitatively_ a more portable environment
than MS-DOS.  Not better (well...), not on as many individual machines (yet),
but certainly to be found on more _types_ of systems than MS-DOS (by this I
mean different architectures--instruction sets, word lengths, etc., not 
vendors).  No one was picking on anyone else's favorite OS, so why don't
we return back to a discussion of C?

Bryan Morse                University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
morse at cs.unc.edu           Department of Computer Science