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Aucbvax.5913 fa.info-vax utcsrgv!utzoo!decvax!ucbvax!info-vax Fri Jan 22 12:14:30 1982 Unix, VMS, and transportability >From decvax!duke!bcw@Berkeley Fri Jan 22 12:06:55 1982 This is a comment on the remark made in this newsgroup that programs written on Unix tended to be more transportable than programs written on other operating systems because Unix would probably be moved to many different architectures with time. If you consider "portability" to mean only that the operating system plus program can be moved to some other architecture in the future, than this is quite true.

Many of us have to deal with criteria of "portability" which are stricter than this -- programs which can run on a variety of operating systems. Not everyone runs the same OS, however nice that would be; often programs have to be run on such diverse systems as Unix, VMS, OS/360, and half a dozen others. In this environment, C isn't too portable a language (even apart from some of its machine dependent features), since most machines you encounter in the real world don't have a C compiler. Fortran and to some extent Pascal and PL/I are more transportable than C (with the exception that Unix doesn't [yet] have a PL/I compiler). This may not be pleasant, but we'll probably have to learn to live with it for quite some time.

Bruce C. Wright @ Duke University

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