Aucbvax.5913
fa.info-vax
utcsrgv!utzoo!decvax!ucbvax!info-vax
Fri Jan 22 12:14:30 1982
Unix, VMS, and transportability
>From decvax!duke!bcw@Berkeley Fri Jan 22 12:06:55 1982
This is a comment on the remark made in this newsgroup that
programs written on Unix tended to be more transportable than
programs written on other operating systems because Unix would
probably be moved to many different architectures with time.
If you consider "portability" to mean only that the operating
system plus program can be moved to some other architecture in
the future, than this is quite true.
Many of us have to deal with criteria of "portability" which
are stricter than this -- programs which can run on a variety
of operating systems. Not everyone runs the same OS, however
nice that would be; often programs have to be run on such
diverse systems as Unix, VMS, OS/360, and half a dozen others.
In this environment, C isn't too portable a language (even
apart from some of its machine dependent features), since most
machines you encounter in the real world don't have a C compiler.
Fortran and to some extent Pascal and PL/I are more transportable
than C (with the exception that Unix doesn't [yet] have a PL/I
compiler). This may not be pleasant, but we'll probably have to
learn to live with it for quite some time.
Bruce C. Wright @ Duke University
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