Portability and Profitablity

[Bruce]

In article <415 at thirdi.UUCP> peter at thirdi.UUCP (Peter Rowell) writes:
>
>Speaking as a software developer who wants his code to run on as many
>machines as possible (or to port easily to many machines), the whole
>
>You *know* that they will be POSIX conforming or else they won't be
>able to bid on those nice, fat government contracts.  If you write code
>that uses a local feature put in by a manufacturer, *you* are the one
>guilty of non-portable code.  This goes just as much for a "special"

Yes, this is an excellent point.  When I first started playing around
with my AT in 1984, the os that I got with it was PC DOS 3.1.  So
I naively wrote some code which used the DOS calls promiscuously and
when I took a diskette to work to show some friends what I had wrought
I quickly discovered why the os standard was *NOT* simply DOS, but
rather DOS 2.0, the lowest common subset which supported tree structured
directories.

I thereafter never used any system services which were not in "common"
DOS (2.0).  A point I'm sure that is already well known by developers
of all *IX based software.

-- 
  Bruce Kern                                 |  uunet!swlabs!csd-v!bak  
  Computer Systems Design                    |  1-203-270-0399          
  29 High Rock Rd., Sandy Hook, Ct. 06482    |  This space for rent.