Path: utzoo!mnetor!uunet!lll-winken!lll-lcc!pyramid!nsc!csi!jwhitnel
From: jwhitnel@csi.UUCP (Jerry Whitnell)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.amiga
Subject: Re: Feeping Creaturism
Message-ID: <1447@csib.csi.UUCP>
Date: 10 Mar 88 19:25:00 GMT
References: <8803090725.AA05559@cory.Berkeley.EDU>
Reply-To: jwhitnel@csib.UUCP (Jerry Whitnell)
Organization: Communications Solutions Inc., San Jose, Ca
Lines: 68

In article <8803090725.AA05559@cory.Berkeley.EDU> dillon@CORY.BERKELEY.EDU (Matt Dillon) writes:
|
|	Two excerps from Larry Rosenstein's mac-misconceptions posting.
|All his comments are, of course, true, though it is necessary to talk 
|about the degree of trueness on two of them.
|
|:>The idea of porting a Mac program to anything else, or porting anyone
|:>else's programs to the Mac, is pretty much a fantasy. Unless you write a
|:>badly-behaved Mac program or use A/UX.
|:
|:People at Microsoft, Aldus, ... would disagree with you.  They ported their
|:programs between the Mac and Windows.  I have read where this was not a
|:major effort (provided you allow for this in the first place).
|
|	As you said, provided you allow for this in the first place.  The
|original message and response are assuming two different types of 
|programs anyway, so point and counter-point don't exactly mesh.  Graphic
|oriented IBM programs are easy to port anyway because the IBM (PC) has no
|kernel... at least nothing real.

IBM Programs written for Windows are difficult to port to other enviroments
(other then the Mac) for the same reason that Mac programs are difficult to
port because Windows using an event-driven model similar to the Macs.  Porting
graphics programs that don't use Windows would be very difficult to port
because they depend on the hardware enviroment (ega vs. cga vs. vga) and
not on any higher-level interface.

|
|	In fact, up until recently, compilers and assemblers on the IBM-PC
|were woefully out of date.  Did you hear they finally upgraded MASM from,
|what was it? compiled fortran? or was it compiled basic?  Can you believe
|that?

This happend a couple of years ago.

|
|:
|:It seems to me that porting an Amiga program would be even more difficult,
|:unless that program was designed to be ported and didn't take advantage of
|:the unique Amiga features.
|
|	Porting things *to* the Amiga is simple... very simple in fact.
|In fact, I can compile some UNIX programs without a single modification.
|The only major problems I've come up against (for UNIX programs) can be 
|blamed on deficiencies in the compiler (Aztec 3.4a in my case) not
|allowing more than 32K static BSS data per object module... you
|wind up having to malloc() the space.

I can do the same on the Macintosh, again with the same caveats.  All of
the Mac C compilers provide a stdio package that translates unix style
calls into Mac OS style calls.  The problems I've had are either compiler
related (poor implementation of the libary, 32K static BSS, etc.) or
all-the-world-is-a-vax-itis.

|	Likewise for porting things FROM the Mac.... about equivalent to
|porting something FROM the Amiga.  

True.  BTW, there is a book out that discusses writting applications that
are portable among the four major windowing systems in the PC market
(Mac, Amiga, Atari and Microsoft windows).  I don't have it here so I
don't have the title.  Will post it latter if possible and if interested.

|
|
|					-Matt

Jerry Whitnell				Been through Hell?
Communication Solutions, Inc.		What did you bring back for me?
						- A. Brilliant