Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!ames!ncar!gatech!emcard!mdt!pwd
From: pwd@mdt.UUCP (Phil Dalrymple)
Newsgroups: comp.os.misc
Subject: Re: Why Unix is good (was Re: Unix bigotry) LONG
Message-ID: <4122@mdt.UUCP>
Date: 17 Feb 89 13:35:33 GMT
References: <117@spectra.COM> <692@cvbnet2.UUCP> <3101@ficc.uu.net> <285@bnr-fos.UUCP> <140@aucis.UUCP>
Reply-To: pwd@mdt.UUCP (Phil Dalrymple)
Organization: MDT, Inc. Marietta Ga.
Lines: 34

In article <285@bnr-fos.UUCP>, schow@bnr-public.uucp (Stanley Chow) writes:
> There are lots of other points againist Unix:
> 
>   - Non-portable code.  I know the truism "Unix & C are the most  
>     portable system & language". I have no knowledge about the portabiity
>     of Unix itself (the many versions of it) but the horror stories I
>     have heard (and read about in the net) makes me think twice.
>     (I am not saying it is impossible to produce an implementation of
>     Unix that is nicely protable or that all C programs are inherantly
>     non-portable, just that current practice does not).

In fact we have about 250K lines of code that runs under Unix on five
differnet system (both SYSV and 4.2) and the ONLY changes that need to be
made (including ifdefs) are for byte order and the handling of the rs232
handshake lines for a very non standard device that we must connect to.
Most ot those horror stories that I have traced down are cases of 

1)	Hardware (like our rs232 or byte order) but worst.

2)	The people do not know what they are doing.

3)	An attemp is being made to port to another OS as well as Unix.

Item 3 above is the one I notice most often but I can not explan it.
It may be that the fact that a large amount of changes are needed to port
the code to say VMS or MS/DOS makes those doing the ports to a number of
unix systems accecpt a lower standard of portabilty (sp?) in the code.



-- 
Philip W. Dalrymple III
mdt!pwd
404/587-2653