Path: utzoo!utgpu!water!watmath!atbowler From: atbowler@watmath.waterloo.edu (Alan T. Bowler [SDG]) Newsgroups: comp.std.c Subject: Re: Defining Portable (Was: Invalid pointer addresses) Message-ID: <21199@watmath.waterloo.edu> Date: 30 Sep 88 01:17:01 GMT References: <12088@steinmetz.ge.com> <8453@smoke.ARPA> <10595@ulysses.homer.nj.att.com> <1988Sep16.170408.16304@utzoo.uucp> Reply-To: atbowler@watmath.waterloo.edu (Alan T. Bowler [SDG]) Organization: U. of Waterloo, Ontario Lines: 17 In article <1988Sep16.170408.16304@utzoo.uucp> henry@utzoo.uucp (Henry Spencer) writes: >We (at least, I think I speak for Doug and others as well as myself) >are willing to use "portable" as a non-boolean attribute, e.g. to talk >about "levels of portability", but when we use it as a boolean, e.g. >"this program is portable", that's what we mean. This is a reasonable >and proper usage. At one time there were 2 terms "portable" and "machine independant". All programs were "portable" to some extent. The question of interest was "how portable?" I.e. how much work was it to move (i.e. "port") the program to a new environment. This was useful because you could describe the techique of increasing the portability of a program by dividing the source modules into the machine independant and machine dependant parts. Since you seem to want to redefine "portable" as machine independant, can you us a new term that decribes how hard it is to "port" a program from one environment to another?