Defining Portable (Was: Invalid pointer addresses)

[Alan T. Bowler [SDG]]

In article <1988Sep16.170408.16304 at utzoo.uucp> henry at utzoo.uucp (Henry Spencer) writes:
>We (at least, I think I speak for Doug and others as well as myself)
>are willing to use "portable" as a non-boolean attribute, e.g. to talk
>about "levels of portability", but when we use it as a boolean, e.g.
>"this program is portable", that's what we mean.  This is a reasonable
>and proper usage.

At one time there were 2 terms "portable" and "machine independant".
All programs were "portable" to some extent.  The question of
interest was "how portable?" I.e. how much work was it to move
(i.e. "port") the program to a new environment.
This was useful because you could describe the techique of increasing
the portability of a program by dividing the source modules into
the machine independant and machine dependant parts.  Since you seem
to want to redefine "portable" as machine independant, can you us a new
term that decribes how hard it is to "port" a program from one
environment to another?