time(0L) - history of a misconception

[Len Reed]

In article <383 at tmcsys.UUCP> lothar at tmcsys.UUCP (L. Hirschbiegel) writes:

>This was posted to newsgroup "comp.UNIX.SYSV386", right??

>Martin was referring to a "time" syscall argument mismatch under SCO-UNIX.
>I did NOT say this is a general rule-of-thumb for all kinds of cpus
>and all kinds of compilers?!?!

Well, you really should have said "Though it's poor programming practice,
it makes no difference on the 30386."  If your point was that such-and-such
couldn't be the source of certain anamolous behavior, you could have been
clearer.  If your point was that this was acceptable coding practice,
I strongly disagree.

Good programmers distinguish between things that work because they're
done correctly and things that work in spite of being done incorrectly.
Knowlingly to exploit such things as
	sizeof(int) == sizeof(long)  == sizeof(long *)
with the smug idea that the code will never run on any other machine
is shortsighted.
-- 
Len Reed
Holos Software, Inc.
Voice: (404) 496-1358
UUCP: ...!gatech!holos0!lbr