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Path: utzoo!utcsri!utegc!utai!garfield!dalcs!silvert
From: silvert@dalcs.UUCP
Newsgroups: news.groups,comp.sys.atari.st
Subject: Re: Binary newsgroups (was: new group for Atari ST software)
Message-ID: <2425@dalcs.UUCP>
Date: Mon, 2-Mar-87 18:38:16 EST
Article-I.D.: dalcs.2425
Posted: Mon Mar  2 18:38:16 1987
Date-Received: Tue, 3-Mar-87 18:47:04 EST
References: <882@imagen.UUCP> <1073@ulowell.cs.ulowell.edu> <1271@husc6.UUCP> <12621@gatech.EDU>
Organization: Marine Ecology Lab.
Lines: 38
Keywords: newsgroup,atari,st
Summary: Are sources very portable?

In article <12621@gatech.EDU>, spaf@gatech.UUCP writes:
> With source, at least, you can make
> (usually minor) changes and recompile for a different machine.  No such
> luck with binary.
> 
> If you're going to start a group, I'd want source only.  If you create
> both source and binary, it is probable that sometime before too long
> we'd only carry the source group.
> 
> Gene Spafford

Gene raises an interesting point about the portability of source code.
As Eunuchs (or whatever we call ourselves) we are used to source code in
C which we know how to port between V at BSD.  Non-Unix machines use
other languages.  CP/M and MS-DOS were long dominated by assembler and
Turbo Pascal, and of course many micros use(d) BASIC.  But the ST and
other 68K machines use a variety of languages, and I don't think that
UseNet supports much general source in these languages.  I don't see any
source in the modula-2 or f77 groups I subscribe to, and net.sources and
mod.sources are automatically C.

If there were groups called {net,mod}.sources.{C,mod2,pascal,asm,c++,...}
then I would look for portable source code.  Otherwise, I think that
Gene has raised a red herring (which is properly the responsibility of
older red herrings).

Looking at this constructively, the basic question is whether source
code is machine-specific or language-specific.  If the latter, then Gene
has a point, and we should set up language source groups.  If the
former, then the rest of us are on the right track.  While I would like
to see more machine-independent source code, it may be tricky -- what
about all the GEM calls for the ST, for example.  Is there even a
portable way to search a directory in any language?
-- 
Bill Silvert
Marine Ecology Laboratory, Dartmouth, NS, Canada
CDN or BITNET: silvert@cs.dal.cdn	-- UUCP: ..!{seismo|utai}!dalcs!silvert
ARPA: silvert%dalcs.uucp@seismo.CSS.GOV	-- CSNET: silvert%cs.dal.cdn@ubc.csnet