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From: jack@cwi.nl (Jack Jansen)
Newsgroups: comp.os.misc
Subject: Re: Why Unix is good (was Re: Unix bigotry) LONG
Message-ID: <7911@boring.cwi.nl>
Date: 17 Feb 89 10:00:21 GMT
References: <117@spectra.COM> <692@cvbnet2.UUCP> <3101@ficc.uu.net> <285@bnr-fos.UUCP>
Sender: news@cwi.nl
Organization: AMOEBA project, CWI, Amsterdam
Lines: 34

Although I come to hate unix more and more (current unices, that
is, let nobody insult V7:-), there are a few things in Stanley's
posting that I would like to comment on:

In article <285@bnr-fos.UUCP> schow@bnr-public.UUCP (Stanley Chow) writes:
>  - Non-protable 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).

The real-world issue is not portability of the kernel but portability
of user programs. Unix is still the only OS in the world that will
allow *reasonably* easy porting of *many* programs to *some*
wildly different machines. Note the emphasised words: porting is not
trivial, it will not work for all programs, and not for all machines.

Compare porting a program between Amdahl UTS, Dec VMS and XENIX
to porting it between OS/360, VMS and MS/DOS.
>
>  - The worst ergonometric design for a human interface I have ever
>    seen.
Absolutely true. Playing devils advocate again, though: have you
ever worked on OS/360? NOS/BE? Or, more in the same class of OS'es
as unix, VMS or MS/DOS?
The *only* reason novices can manage to learn MS/DOS is because there
are only 5 commands to learn. MSDOS < UNIX <<<<<<< Macintosh.

-- 
--
Fight war, not wars			| Jack Jansen, jack@cwi.nl
Destroy power, not people! -- Crass	| (or mcvax!jack)