Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!mcvax!ukc!stl!stc!praxis!hardy!drb
From: drb@praxis.co.uk (David Brownbridge)
Newsgroups: comp.unix.wizards
Subject: Re: Joy of Joys (porting C-shell)
Message-ID: <2629@newton.praxis.co.uk>
Date: 12 Jul 88 10:25:23 GMT
References: <3522@hcr.UUCP> <1296@basser.oz>
Sender: news@praxis.co.uk
Reply-To: drb%praxis@ukc.ac.uk (David Brownbridge)
Organization: Praxis Systems plc, Bath, UK
Lines: 36

In article <1296@basser.oz> boyd@basser.oz (Boyd Roberts) writes:
>Those coders who believe all the world is a VAX are just
>wrong-wrong-wrong.  

yes Yes YES!

>Somehow High Level Hardware ported 4.2BSD to their box. ...
>... I think I heard rumours about them releasing NFS on it.

I worked on the NFS port when I was at HLH.  The "portable" NFS sources were
certainly written with VAXen in mind.  Imagine my Joy(!) at finding a simple
piece of pointer arithmetic broken by gratuitous casting:

    some_routine()  /* located in an NFS kernel near you */
    {
	    char *a, *b, *c;

	    /* ... code setting b,c to point to parts of an array ... */

	    a = (int) b - (int) c;
    }

Because Orion integer arithmetic is different from pointer arithmetic the
answer delivered in "a" is garbage. Remove the casts and all is ok.

As a historical note, the Orion you mention is now superceded by the
Clipper-based Orion 1/05 and HLH probably posses the most portable set of
BSD/NFS sources in the known universe!


David Brownbridge    +44-225-444700   drb%praxis@ukc.ac.uk
Praxis Systems plc
20 Manvers St
Bath 
Avon
UK    BA1 1PX