From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 From: grog@lemis.com (Greg 'groggy' Lehey) Date: Mon, 27 Feb 2017 07:49:00 +1100 Subject: [TUHS] Portability (was: BSDi Imaging) In-Reply-To: <20170226125050.9691E18C09B@mercury.lcs.mit.edu> References: <20170226125050.9691E18C09B@mercury.lcs.mit.edu> Message-ID: <20170226204900.GC15516@eureka.lemis.com> On Sunday, 26 February 2017 at 7:50:50 -0500, Noel Chiappa wrote: > > There were in theory portable languages beforehand (e.g. PL/1), but > I think it probably over-specified things - e.g. it would be > impossible to port Multics to another architecture without almost > completely re-writing it from scratch, the code is shot through with > "fixed bin(18)"'s every other line... That may be coloured by your perspective. C was never designed to be portable, while much older languages like Algol and Cobol were. There were quite different reasons for C's success. To quote "The Programmer's ABC's” from Datamation, April 1976: C is for Cobol What a pity It was designed By a committee Greg -- Sent from my desktop computer. Finger grog at lemis.com for PGP public key. See complete headers for address and phone numbers. This message is digitally signed. If your Microsoft mail program reports problems, please read http://lemis.com/broken-MUA -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: signature.asc Type: application/pgp-signature Size: 163 bytes Desc: not available URL: