Path: utzoo!mnetor!uunet!seismo!sundc!pitstop!sun!decwrl!labrea!aurora!eos!ames!hao!scdpyr!cruff
From: cruff@scdpyr.UUCP (Craig Ruff)
Newsgroups: comp.arch
Subject: Re: RISC is a nasty no-no!
Message-ID: <284@scdpyr.UUCP>
Date: 28 Feb 88 05:18:29 GMT
References: <179@wsccs.UUCP> <696@nuchat.UUCP>
Reply-To: cruff@scdpyr.UUCP (Craig Ruff)
Organization: Natl Ctr Atmospheric Research, Boulder, CO
Lines: 33

In article <696@nuchat.UUCP> steve@nuchat.UUCP (Steve Nuchia) writes:
>From article <179@wsccs.UUCP>, by terry@wsccs.UUCP (terry):
>[ lots of self-congratulation about how portable his code is, followed
>  by complaints that it isn't portable to the SPARC ]
>
>> THE REASON:  Type-casting.  You can't.
>
>FLAME ON!    ( I love this! )
>
>WRONG.  It is demonstrably NON-portable code - it failed to port
>to a working compiler on a reasonable machine.  If the bloody
>unix kernel runs (and it does) your silly application should, too.
>
>FLAME OFF.

I've just ported several thousand lines of code to the Sun-4.  The only
problem I had was in the use of the ndbm library.  I was doing a
structure copy with the dptr result from dbm_fetch, which turned out to
be non-word aligned.  Of course the documentation does not state that
the dptr will be word aligned, in fact, it doesn't state anything at
all about this.  Anyway, type casts do exist in this code, though in 
small numbers.  Since I knew this code would eventually reside on the Sun-4,
I was careful to write it with portability in mind.  I also ported many
more thousand lines of both C (written with Unix portability in mind) and
Fortran (gak! written with many-vendor machine portability in mind).  Not
one single problem related to data alignment or casting.

In all, I'd say that the Sun-4 does not present any unsolvable problems
in porting code.  If your code is really portable that is. :-)
-- 
Craig Ruff      NCAR                         INTERNET: cruff@scdpyr.UCAR.EDU
(303) 497-1211  P.O. Box 3000                   CSNET: cruff@ncar.CSNET
		Boulder, CO  80307               UUCP: cruff@scdpyr.UUCP