Common Reference Ballot

[Peter da Silva]

From: peter at ficc.ferranti.com (Peter da Silva)

[ in the real world there are programmers who aren always as sensitive
  to portability issues as they should be ]

> I like to think I'm working in the real world, and because I do care
> about application portability I'm careful about these things when I
> program.  I suspect I'm not the only one.

You and I will do that. But the people whose code I find myself maintaining
are not always quite so careful. They generally try to conform to the
standard as far as they know it, but aren't willing to go back to the base
document to check on stuff they're sure is correct.

> Note that there IS no magic
> road to guaranteed portability, if the programmer is oblivious to the
> issues.

Not oblivious. Just not as sensitive as they should be. Say, someone trying
to maintain a program that uses mmap(). Suddenly they need to save state,
so they put the arguments in to map the whole file in. Six months later,
when time comes to integrate this code back to the baseline it breaks on
some machine that doesn't have a real mmap().

I don't want a magic road, but the signposts should at least be clear.

[ extensions should require some magic juju before they're active, like
  calling mmap instead of shmmap ]
> That would be nice, but it's pretty hard to enforce in cases like
> adding extended functionality to the standard functions.

Such as?
-- 
`-_-' Peter da Silva. +1 713 274 5180.  <peter at ficc.ferranti.com>
 'U`  Have you hugged your wolf today?  <peter at sugar.hackercorp.com>
@FIN  Dirty words: Zhghnyyl erphefvir vayvar shapgvbaf.


Volume-Number: Volume 20, Number 15