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Subject: Re: Crafty Why?

Author: Dann Corbit

Date: 11:01:16 10/31/03

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On October 31, 2003 at 08:55:46, Matthew Hull wrote:
[snip[
>Hmmm.  Have you tried porting a chess program from Windows to Unix.  Good golly,
>look at all the bletcherous Windows "damage" you have to undo to make it run.

Sure.  In fact, it is simple to write a program that cleanly runs in both
environments.

We have some really fun 64 bit unix boxes here.  We also have an IBM 390, an
AS400, 64 bit OpenVMS machines and anything else you can think of.  We write
software here that runs on everything.

To write a good program (of any kind) you put everything possible into standards
based computing.  That means that you follow the ANSI/ISO standards where ever
possible.  And when you have to deviate from that standard, put those bits in a
separate section of code (the interface layer, usually).

A good program is simple to port from one system to another.  Bletcherous crap
code gets stuck on a single platform.  Always because of lazy or stupid
programming.

That is one of the few bad things about GCC.  It has a bunch of strange
extensions that will render code as "GCC ONLY."  People often take advantage of
these extensions, even though they have very little real value [HEY -- Looky
what I can do with GCC here!].  Then, the code is damaged to such a degree that
it can't go anywhere else.  For instance, I might want to run a program on a
1GHz Alpha running OpenVMS.  Find me a GCC/G++ compiler for that one.




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