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From: emery@MITRE-BEDFORD.ARPA (Emery)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.ada
Subject: portability
Message-ID: <8612191435.AA16263@mitre-bedford.ARPA>
Date: Fri, 19-Dec-86 09:35:18 EST
Article-I.D.: mitre-be.8612191435.AA16263
Posted: Fri Dec 19 09:35:18 1986
Date-Received: Sat, 20-Dec-86 02:07:53 EST
Sender: daemon@ucbvax.BERKELEY.EDU
Organization: The MITRE Corp., Bedford, MA
Lines: 16

I wish I could honestly say "You can't be serious..." when you say that your
co-workers don't believe that a program in Ada (or any other HOL) will not
produce the same results when compiled into two different instruction set
architectures.  Do your co-workers have doubts about Fortran?  How about
Unix, which was originally implemented on a PDP11, and now runs on everything
from an IBM-PC to a Cray?  Sure, there are machine dependencies that have to
be resolved, but I think that language portability has been pretty well proven
by now.  

Unfortunately, I can believe that you know people who don't believe this.  It's
a sad commentary on our profession that these people exist.

					Dave Emery
					MITRE Corp.
p.s.  These are my opinions, not the opinions of MITRE Corp. the DoD, or anyone
else...