Making portable utilities (originally void typecasts)

[BostonU SysMgr]

(Flame about no Make under VMS thus impacting portability)

There is a collision here of two notions of portability (at least.)

One is C code that will run anywhere and C code that will run under
any UNIX system (as extreme but common examples.)

The former (gee, UNIX does, make VMS do it too...oh those cwazy unix
programmers...foiled again!) is very difficult, unless I was quite
conscious that I needed to have my programs run under VMS or some such
I would be loathe to toss out all my software engineering tools just to
make life easy for sensory deprivation environments, that is the job
of a VMS programmer, if my code is reasonable it will probably work
with some effort, if it's not worth their effort, well, then why should
it be worthwhile to me? Someone has to pay me big bucks to ensure a
complicated piece of code will run under *any* C compiler, that's non-trivial.

On the other hand, to write a C program that runs under any UNIX system,
well that's just a chore, not very hard really as long as the system wasn't
spec'd to run using peculiar features of, say, SYSV or Berkeley (eg. shared
mem or internet specific.)

And speak of the pot calling the kettle black! Just try to move VMesS
Footran programs to UNIX, they won't even try to follow the damn
language standards, let alone library calls and surrounding software
(I'll take the DCL that builds this mess anyday if *you* will just
follow the language standard.) Hrmph, I say sir, hrmph.

Yeah, I know the answer, UNIX/C promised a lot of portability, while
VMS never promised anything.

	-Barry Shein, Boston University