Path: utzoo!utgpu!watmath!clyde!att!osu-cis!tut.cis.ohio-state.edu!ukma!rutgers!cmcl2!esquire!sbb
From: sbb@esquire.UUCP (Stephen B. Baumgarten)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.mac
Subject: Re: The Mythical Man Month
Message-ID: <874@esquire.UUCP>
Date: 7 Dec 88 20:14:47 GMT
References: <6176@fluke.COM> <10330096@accuvax.nwu.edu>
Reply-To: sbb@esquire.UUCP (Stephen B. Baumgarten)
Distribution: na
Organization: DP&W, New York, NY
Lines: 36

In article <10330096@accuvax.nwu.edu> bob@accuvax.nwu.edu (Bob Hablutzel) writes:
[ Responding to the problem of assembly not being portable ]
>Let me back off from this one a little - I didn't state it very well. (Yes, 
>I have written a lot of software - for almost 12 years now). I think the above
>statements have more to do with cold-killers than reality. I will agree that
>purely mathematical, or "semi-numeric" type problems, are good candidates for
>high level languages (assuming decent compilers are available, and these
>routines are not critical ones). What I really meant to attack is the use of
>portability for things like user interface code, file system interaction, etc.
>There seems to be an ugly trend toward "totally" portable code - this can
>only lead to lowest common denominator code.

According to Microsoft, 90% of the code for Excel is the same across
Mac and DOS/Windows platforms.

General code for file-system management is *precisely* what you want;
then your application can just make calls to the general routines
"get_file_name_from_user", "open_data_file", "write_record", etc.  When
porting to a different platform, only these low-level interface
routines need be rewritten.

Of course user-interface code should not be ported to inappropriate
platforms, but an additional "user-interface manager" layer can be
written to interface the application to the particular windowing
environment.

Use of high-level languages allow you to maintain a single (large) body
of code that can be used regardless of the specific operating system,
window manager, CPU, etc.  Wouldn't this be difficult (or even
impossible) to do if the majority of your code was written in assembly?

-- 
   Steve Baumgarten             | "New York... when civilization falls apart,
   Davis Polk & Wardwell        |  remember, we were way ahead of you."
   cmcl2!esquire!sbb            | 
   esquire!sbb@cmcl2.nyu.edu    |                           - David Letterman