Joy of Joys (porting C-shell)

[David Brownbridge]

In article <1296 at basser.oz> boyd at basser.oz (Boyd Roberts) writes:
>Those coders who believe all the world is a VAX are just
>wrong-wrong-wrong.  

yes Yes YES!

>Somehow High Level Hardware ported 4.2BSD to their box. ...
>... I think I heard rumours about them releasing NFS on it.

I worked on the NFS port when I was at HLH.  The "portable" NFS sources were
certainly written with VAXen in mind.  Imagine my Joy(!) at finding a simple
piece of pointer arithmetic broken by gratuitous casting:

    some_routine()  /* located in an NFS kernel near you */
    {
	    char *a, *b, *c;

	    /* ... code setting b,c to point to parts of an array ... */

	    a = (int) b - (int) c;
    }

Because Orion integer arithmetic is different from pointer arithmetic the
answer delivered in "a" is garbage. Remove the casts and all is ok.

As a historical note, the Orion you mention is now superceded by the
Clipper-based Orion 1/05 and HLH probably posses the most portable set of
BSD/NFS sources in the known universe!


David Brownbridge    +44-225-444700   drb%praxis at ukc.ac.uk
Praxis Systems plc
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