Machines for testing portability (was Re: "Numerical Recipes in C" is nonportable code)

[David Collier-Brown]

>>In article <1673 at dataio.Data-IO.COM> bright at dataio.Data-IO.COM (Walter Bright) writes:
>>: The best way to learn to write portable code is to be required to port
>>: your applications to Vaxes, 68000s, and PCs. (I have all 3 on my desk!)

>From article <795 at ns.UUCP>, by ddb at ns.UUCP (David Dyer-Bennet):
>   No portability check is complete until you've tried some word-oriented
> rather than byte-oriented system.  Preferrably something with a word-size
> not a multiple of 8 bits (like 60, or 36).  CDC, Unisys, Honeywell, and of
> course the DEC PDP-10 series all come to mind.

  Actually the 9-bit byte machines are fairly easy to port to: all
sorts of code of varying quality will run on the Honeywell-Bull
DPS-8 using the Waterloo C Compiler.  Try a machine with funny
pointer lengths like the DPS-6, though...  Its an 8-bit byte, but
char pointers are 48 bits and others are 32, if you use to high an
address the system will trap even loading a register, etc, etc.

--dave (Bell labs had a DPS-8 C compiler many moons ago) c-b
-- 
 David Collier-Brown.  |{yunexus,utgpu}!geac!lethe!dave
 78 Hillcrest Ave,.    | He's so smart he's dumb.
 Willowdale, Ontario.  |        --Joyce C-B