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

Johan Vromans jv at mhres.mh.nl
Thu Sep 1 23:05:25 AEST 1988


>From article <673 at proxftl.UUCP>, by bill at proxftl.UUCP (T. William Wells):
> Anybody else have suggestions on sets of systems for checking
> portability?

I have used an Hewlett-Packard HP9000 model 500, which has a very
strange memory architecture (uses non-contiguous memory
segments), and a real stack (which means that uninitialized local variables
contain a zero). Emacs cannot run on it.

There exists a Pr1me system which always has the high bit
of each byte set, so ASCII runs from 128 to 255.

Of course, EBCDIC machines catch most of the programs which
avoided <ctype.h> but use ('a' <= x && x <= 'z') , and segmented
memory machines (like PC's with large model) catch all programs
that (mis)use ints and pointers and longs.

-- 
	Johan



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