🚀 go-pugleaf

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.

Dan
-- 
Dan Pop
CERN, CN Division
Email: danpop@mail.cern.ch 
Mail:  CERN - PPE, Bat. 31 R-004, CH-1211 Geneve 23, Switzerland