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From: alexis@reed.UUCP (Alexis Dimitriadis)
Newsgroups: net.lang
Subject: Re: Standardization
Message-ID: <1155@reed.UUCP>
Date: Sat, 23-Mar-85 18:13:09 EST
Article-I.D.: reed.1155
Posted: Sat Mar 23 18:13:09 1985
Date-Received: Wed, 27-Mar-85 02:52:02 EST
References: <322@gumby.UUCP> <7025@watdaisy.UUCP> <6360@boring.UUCP>
Reply-To: alexis@reed.UUCP (PUT YOUR NAME HERE)
Distribution: net
Organization: Reed College, Portland, Oregon
Lines: 41
Summary: 

In article <6360@boring.UUCP> jack@boring.UUCP (Jack Jansen) writes:

[...]
> Although you will have a *lot* of trouble to simulate 'chdir' if
>your target machine doesn't have directories, you can probably still
>come up with something. If your Pascal compiler doesn't have
>'otherwise' or something similar, you have to change even the 
>structure of the program.
>
> I know of no such syntactical differences in C compilers, maybe with
>the exception of multiple defined externs (which you shouldn't have used
>anyway), and long identifiers. Both of these are much less serious
>than the differences in Pascal-flavors.

  The list gets longer if you throw in things like structure assignment, 
passing/returning structures, etc, which are not supported by older (but
still in use) C compilers.  

  A more serious problem, in my opinion, is the fact that an integer
may or may not be the same size as a short and/or a long.  Sure, a program
developed on a VAX (sizeof int == sizeof long) will compile on a PDP,
(sizeof int < sizeof long) but that is small comfort.  Of course, both 
compilers adhere to the standard, but the semantics of short/int/long
are nevertheless different.  And it is VERY hard to keep longs and ints
straight if, on your machine, they are interchangeable.  

  At least with Pascal you can usually (lazy i/o and string input
to the contrary), expect a program that will compile without error to 
run correctly.

 By the way, the lack of a closely followed standard for Pascal has been
discussed in net.lang.pascal (and net.lang.c!).  It seemed absolutely 
clear that (almost) no implementations follow the letter of the standard.

			Alexis Dimitriadis
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