🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <9602051257.AA29046@dxmint.cern.ch>, Dan Pop
<danpop@mail.cern.ch> wrote:

> A scientist or engineer who wants to run his programs, developed on other
> systems, on his Mac, via a simple compilation (they were written in
> portable C, after all)

Yeah, sure.  There are absolutely no #ifdefs in the code, right?

> is in the situation of not being able to use the Mac
> for any other purposes.

Yes, if the scientist or engineer wants to behave like an idiot, the MacOS
will in no way, shape or form prevent him or her from doing so.  Just like
Unix itself won't stop me from writing:

while (1) {
   malloc(1000);
   fork();
}

It takes the administrator setting process limits to stop this from
causing trouble.

> Or to learn the misteries of MacOS, on which he
> doesn't have any interest, because he's not a Mac programmer, he's only a
> Mac user.

He's not much of a programmer, period, if he can't figure out that he
needs to give up time in a CMT environment if he wants other things to
run.  I don't buy this "he's really smart about writing portable code",
which is not a trivial thing to do, but "he's really stupid when it comes
to allowing his code to multitask on a CMT system", which is a really
trivial thing to do.

Every time I've switched systems, whether it was from VMS -> Unix, or the
PC -> MacOS, I've had to learn something to start using the other system. 
As a programmer, I know that I have to learn a little bit more.  Any
programmer who knows enough to write portable code also knows this, or he
wouldn't have been able to write the portable code in the first place.
-- 
        Nevin ":-)" Liber       nevin@CS.Arizona.EDU    (520) 293-2799