Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!portal!cup.portal.com!doug-merritt
From: doug-merritt@cup.portal.com
Newsgroups: comp.sys.amiga
Subject: Re: 80286- er, 68000 memory models
Message-ID: <6064@cup.portal.com>
Date: 30 May 88 18:36:47 GMT
References: <2672@louie.udel.EDU> <5880@cup.portal.com> <515@sas.UUCP>
Organization: The Portal System (TM)
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John Toebes writes:
> (Gee, maybe I am sounding like a broken record on the subject, but the
> amount of work to put prototypes into code is trivial and they gain so
> much).

Yeah, function prototypes are wonderful; they catch lots of errors, and
they fit perfectly into the spirit of the C language.

Pity that they're not widely available enough yet to be able to consider
them a truly portable construct. This will eventually change, but it'll
take a while. Consider structure bit fields, structure assignment,
and enums, all of which are still "new" in the sense that they're not
100% universally available, and are often buggy anyway, even though
it's been quite some years now since they were added to the language.
I avoid all three of these constructs when I write code intended to be
as portable as possible.

Therefore I would suggest not depending on function prototypes becoming
universally available.

Of course, simply having them supported by Manx as well as Lattice would
be sufficient for 95% of the code written for Amiga's.
	Doug
--
      Doug Merritt        ucbvax!sun.com!cup.portal.com!doug-merritt
                      or  ucbvax!eris!doug (doug@eris.berkeley.edu)
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