27 Feb
2017
27 Feb
'17
6:31 a.m.
On Sunday, 26 February 2017 at 17:08:39 -0800, Steve Johnson wrote:
I couldn't disagree more.
I think you could have :-) But thanks for the followup and the
details.
Late in 1974, as I recall, Dennis mused "You
know, I think it would
be easier to move Unix to a new machine than to change a large
application to run on another operating system." I ... offered to
write a portable C compiler.
By that time C on the PDP-11 had been round for a couple of years,
right? And then you go on to be portable. On the other hand, my
understanding of Algol and Cobol is that they didn't start with any
specific architecture in mind. And it was that difference that I was
thinking of when I said that C wasn't designed to be portable. A
matter of viewpoint, maybe.
I'm not belittling the design of C, nor your or Dennis' work, but
there's nothing you've said here that suggested that C was designed
from the outset to be portable.
So C was indisputably intended to be portable, at
least in that
sense. And in practice it was highly portable while sacrificing
little in performance on different systems (unlike some other
languages).
That certainly applied to the difference between C and Algol. In
defence of Algol, it had no prior art to build on.
Greg
--
Sent from my desktop computer.
Finger grog(a)lemis.com for PGP public key.
See complete headers for address and phone numbers.
This message is digitally signed. If your Microsoft mail program
reports problems, please read http://lemis.com/broken-MUA