Path: utzoo!mnetor!uunet!husc6!mailrus!ames!oliveb!pyramid!prls!philabs!pwa-b!mmintl!franka
From: franka@mmintl.UUCP (Frank Adams)
Newsgroups: comp.arch
Subject: Re: Bad RISC
Message-ID: <2754@mmintl.UUCP>
Date: 4 Mar 88 18:34:04 GMT
References: <216@wsccs.UUCP>
Reply-To: franka@mmintl.UUCP (Frank Adams)
Organization: Ashton-Tate Corporation, East Hartford Development Center
Lines: 21
Keywords: SUN RISC

In article <216@wsccs.UUCP> terry@wsccs.UUCP (terry) writes:
>My definition of portable:  Everthing I write ... should run with minor
>changes.  These changes should only be necessary as symptoms of differences
>in O/S implementation philosophy, and not as differences in basic structure.

There are two kinds of portability issues: those based on differences in the
operating system, and those based on hardware differences.  As the following
makes clear:

>Other definition of portability:  If it ran on UNIX and you ported it to VMS
>so that all you had to do was #define UNIX or VMS, it should be relatively
>trivial to port it to other machines.

Terry has, until now, only dealt with the operating system differences up
til now.  But hardware differences are very real, and wishing won't make
them go away.  Writing code which does not depend on the details of the
hardware (mostly) will.
-- 

Frank Adams                           ihnp4!philabs!pwa-b!mmintl!franka
Ashton-Tate          52 Oakland Ave North         E. Hartford, CT 06108