Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!ukma!uflorida!novavax!twwells!bill
From: bill@twwells.uucp (T. William Wells)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.c
Subject: Re: Book on Microsoft C
Message-ID: <808@twwells.uucp>
Date: 31 Mar 89 22:16:16 GMT
References: <754@oravax.UUCP> <225800146@uxe.cso.uiuc.edu> <9937@smoke.BRL.MIL>
Reply-To: bill@twwells.UUCP (T. William Wells)
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In article <9937@smoke.BRL.MIL> gwyn@brl.arpa (Doug Gwyn (VLD/VMB) <gwyn>) writes:
: In article <225800146@uxe.cso.uiuc.edu> mcdonald@uxe.cso.uiuc.edu writes:
: >"Portability" is a word seldom heard outside the academic discussions
: >of Usenet.
:
: That's utter nonsense.  Anyone concerned with getting his applications
: to work on a wide variety of unlike systems quickly learns to care
: about program and environment portability.  That doesn't necessarily
: mean that code is ported with 0 adaptation, but rather that the changes
: needed are designed to be minimal and cleanly isolated from the bulk of
: the application.
:
: There are numerous commercial software vendors who rely on portable C
: programming practice as the basis for providing versions of their
: products on as many popular machines as possible.

Damn right.

We (Proximity Technology) are one of them. Basically, to us, if it
isn't portable, it's a liability. Our code ports to many hundreds of
machines/systems; did it not, we'd be out of business.

And we might ask all those UNIX folks about portability.  Where would
UNIX be today if it wasn't relatively portable?

Academic, indeed!

---
Bill                            { uunet | novavax } !twwells!bill
(BTW, I'm may be looking for a new job sometime in the next few
months.  If you know of a good one where I can be based in South
Florida do send me e-mail.)