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 As a historical note, the Orion you mention is now superceded by the Clipper-based Orion 1/05 and HLH probably posses the most portable set of BSD/NFS sources in the known universe!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