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From: guilford@rpics.UUCP
Newsgroups: comp.sys.amiga
Subject: Re: Portable "C" Code
Message-ID: <1102@rpics.RPI.EDU>
Date: Fri, 10-Apr-87 13:32:15 EST
Article-I.D.: rpics.1102
Posted: Fri Apr 10 13:32:15 1987
Date-Received: Fri, 17-Apr-87 00:37:21 EST
References: <8704071939.AA09157@cory.Berkeley.EDU>
Lines: 32
Summary: Why is C-code not portable?



I've read several articles dealing with the incompatibilities between
lattice and manx C-compilers. This may be a naive question, but why is there
such an incompatibility? Isn't the purpose of a High-Level-Language to avoid
such problems.
I can understand that manx has a small memory model that passes small ints
to subroutines. It seems to me that as long as the entire program was
compiled by the same compiler, this should not matter unless one used one's
own assembler code. (It could also be a problem if one used 'int' and
assumed that it was long--but since C doesn't specify the size of int, one
should have used long anyways.)
The other source of problems would be in what subroutines are supplied and
possibly different reactions from the same subroutines in different versions.
The reason that I am asking this is that I am tired of fighting with this
incompatibility. I hate it when someone writes some nifty program, posts it
on the net (source only), and specifies that it should be compiled under
manx. I, however (regardless of whether this is good or bad) only have
lattice. I try to compile the silly thing there, and I get a couple of
screen fulls of errors. Now I can either try to hack the code to work, or
hope that the author is going to post the binary at some future time. This
seems to me to be a silly way to work.
What I am really wondering is if the sources of the incompatibilities are in
the above, fairly unavoidable, places, or whether the programmers are
writing in sleazy, non-portable ways that are geared to work with the quirks
of their favorite compiler (or is there some other incompatibility that I
haven't thought of?)?
I would think that people writing in C, using the starndard RKM routines
would produce portable code. Is it really that difficult?
I'm rather new at usenet, so I hope I haven't offended anyone.
--Jim Guilford
(guilford@csv.rpi.edu)