Path: utzoo!utgpu!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!rpi!crdgw1!crdos1!davidsen From: davidsen@crdos1.crd.ge.COM (Wm E Davidsen Jr) Newsgroups: comp.arch Subject: Re: Segmented Architectures ( formerly Re: 48-bit computers) Message-ID: <3305@crdos1.crd.ge.COM> Date: 2 Apr 91 14:34:29 GMT References: <1991Mar27.172325.10800@sj.nec.com> <7920@uceng.UC.EDU> Reply-To: davidsen@crdos1.crd.ge.com (bill davidsen) Organization: GE Corp R&D Center, Schenectady NY Lines: 18 In article peter@ficc.ferranti.com (Peter da Silva) writes: | N nice and effectively compatible ones. Outside of the 80x86 family, all | my big portability problems are caused by differences in *software* | architectures or buggy code. All that bigendian vs. little endian stuff is just a bad dream, right? And the problems we've had porting between 32 and 64 bit computers didn't happen? You've been around long enough to know better. The cause of portability problems is code which makes assumptions about the hardware. Period. It is possible to write code which will run on any 32 bit or larger machine, but don't look for it in net source code. -- bill davidsen (davidsen@crdos1.crd.GE.COM -or- uunet!crdgw1!crdos1!davidsen) "Most of the VAX instructions are in microcode, but halt and no-op are in hardware for efficiency"