Newsgroups: comp.lang.c
Path: utzoo!henry
From: henry@utzoo.uucp (Henry Spencer)
Subject: Re: C obfuscator
Message-ID: <1990May28.154118.20390@utzoo.uucp>
Organization: U of Toronto Zoology
References: <12546@netcom.UUCP> <220@taumet.COM> <12573@netcom.UUCP> <4342@muffin.cme.nist.gov> <12579@netcom.UUCP>
Date: Mon, 28 May 90 15:41:18 GMT

In article <12579@netcom.UUCP> ergo@netcom.UUCP (Isaac Rabinovitch) writes:
>>... a useful way to distribute commercial products for multiple
>>platforms...
>Surely you jest.  If the buyer has porting problems, how is he supposed
>to deal with it?  I've never heard of non-trivial source code that didn't
>require tweaking on a new platform.

I've heard of quite a number of examples, and have written some.  Careful
coding plus thorough testing -- practices that seem increasingly unknown
to most programmers, alas -- can work wonders if done conscientiously.

As for how the buyer is supposed to deal with porting problems, the basic
answer is "more easily than he could if he just had a binary".
-- 
As a user I'll take speed over|     Henry Spencer at U of Toronto Zoology
features any day. -A.Tanenbaum| uunet!attcan!utzoo!henry henry@zoo.toronto.edu