Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!rutgers!cs.utexas.edu!uunet!mcvax!kth!sunic!dkuug!freja!rimfaxe!dat0
From: dat0@rimfaxe.diku.dk (Dat-0 undervisningsassistent)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.pascal
Subject: Re: Standard Pascal: Who needs it?
Message-ID: <4821@freja.diku.dk>
Date: 6 Jul 89 13:14:48 GMT
References: <1234@draken.nada.kth.se> <1218@uvm-gen.UUCP>
Sender: news@freja.diku.dk
Lines: 32

cavrak@uvm-gen.UUCP (Steve Cavrak,113 Waterman,6561483,) writes:

>The other day I watched a friend port about 400 lines from Turbo Pascal on
>a PC to Lightspeed on a Mac ... 

>Besides the horror of discovering that the Mac has a problem with the
>line-feed character, and that the European quote caused Lightspeed to
>hang, Wes discovered the long list of "features" that "does not compute"
>(pre initialized "variables" for instance; something strange about the
>undocumented "byte" type, etc.).  

>The conclusion was that this is "Fortran" all over again, and that
>programmers have to adhere to "standards" while the manufacturers lure
>them away with convenient features.  

>If we want the new toys, that's the price.

I don't get the point in your posting. Are you pro or con ? 
As far as I can tell your above example illustrates quite well why a 
standard is to be prefered. And why it is well to stick to it, if you want
to port your programs easily. If you have to use non-standard features,
stick them neatly away in small procedures, so they are easy to find and 
replace.

Kristian Damm Jensen 
(dat0@diku.dk)
Institute of datalogi, University of Copenhagen (DIKU)
Universitetsparken 1, DK-2100 Copenhagen \, Denmark

Kristian Damm Jensen 
(dat0@diku.dk)
Institute of datalogi, University of Copenhagen (DIKU)