Portability

[William LeFebvre]

>From: timothym at tekigm.UUCP (Timothy D Margeson)
>I have not seen anything that demonstrates any form of compatibility between
>any of the Unix' available. You have so many various forms and versions of
>the ne'rdowell 'operating system' (I use the term loosely) that source written
>for one can not be expected to run on any other system.
>...
>The phalacy that Unix and C make things portable makes me sick whenever I
>hear or read someone tauting.

Having just moved yet another Unix program to yet another
architecturally-completely-different machine, I must disagree with you.
I'm sure that many people are quite familiar with the poor quality code
to be found in troff.  Yet, I just successfully moved the source for
device-independent troff, pic, and eqn from a Vax to a Pyramid.  It all
compiled and ran with no problem.  I have also moved the identical
software to a Sun.  I found a bug in pic that was tickled by porting
it, but ditroff and all its other friends ported *without problems*!

In general, a program's lack of portability is not caused by a failure
of C or Unix -- it is caused by the programmers' laziness and inability
to write portable code.  There are, of course, exceptions.  Any system
utility (ps, top, and such) is going to have portability problems, just
by their nature.

Unix and C may not make a completely portable system, but it is a
definite and solid step in the right direction.  I don't see anyone
bringing up VMS on a Sun or a Pyramid!

So, stop your sniveling!  :-)

			William LeFebvre
			Department of Computer Science
			Rice University
			<phil at Rice.arpa>
                        or, for the daring: <phil at Rice.edu>