🚀 go-pugleaf

Dan Pop <danpop@ues5.cern.ch> wrote:
: kathomas@nyx.cs.du.edu (Karl Thomas) writes:

: >You mean all I would have to do is have a preemptive OS and my programs 
: >would automatically be more portable? I guess that would also take care 
: >of all of the other system specific function calls like Quickdraw, the 
: >menu manager, etc.  The only thing that is halfway portable is ANSI-C, 
: >every OS has it's own API that isn't portable.  A portable program 
: >wouldn't be able to take advantage of all the OS specific features.  

: Right.  This is precisely what makes it portable.  There are plenty of
: numerically intensive programs which don't need any OS specific
: features, because all they do is: read their input data from a file,
: crunch it ad nauseam, write the results to another file.  These are
: the typical programs developed by scientists and engineers and they're
: damn portable (if their authors are smart enough to avoid the language
: extensions provided by the compiler vendors).

: But even programs which do benefit from OS-specific features can be
: written semi-portably, by isolating all the system-specific code in
: one file, which has to be rewritten for each new port, while the rest
: of the code is left untouched.  That is, unless the port is to MacOS and
: the portable part has to be stuffed with WaitNextEvent calls.

Well, porting _too_ MacOS looks like a pain, but porting _from_ it looks 
pretty simple...

#ifndef MAC
#define WaitNextEvent(x,y,a,b)     /* Wait Next Event (x,y,a,b) */
#endif /* MAC */

Maybe we should design for the MacOS and then everything will be easily 
portable.

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