[Coco] Expert C programmer wanted
Roger Taylor
rtaylor at bayou.com
Tue Feb 8 16:14:49 EST 2005
Mike,
When you quote messages, it is not separating the quote from your
reply. The only way I could tell is that I was following the thread.
At 01:47 PM 2/8/2005, you wrote:
>
>In a message dated 2/8/05 2:35:37 AM Eastern Standard Time,
>neilsmorr at hotpop.com writes:
>
>I'd take that with a grain of salt. I've never found C to be very portable
>and sometimes it's horrendously unportable. FWIW, I always look at Pascal
>compilers first - personal taste.
>
>
>
>C is very portable once you understand that, unlike early languages like
>Fortran and Basic, C does not try to cover up and homogenize the underlying
>machine hardware -- thus permitting bitwise Boolean operations,
>pointers, etc.
>
>So you have to make sure that your target machine's notions of int, short,
>long, and char are the same as the assumptions made by the original
>programmer. Since s/he probably didn't comment these, and you may have
>no idea where
>the code came from, you may have to think and debug a bit. At least
>learn to
>recognize the cases where you must be careful. Different sizes for "int"
>are
>especially important where pointers are involved.
>
>I luckily escaped the Pascal fad while in school. Tried to get into it on
>the Coco, gave it up quickly. When I feel the need to program in a really
>ugly language (that can nevertheless be forced to do most anything),
>I've got
>Basic09, thanks :-)
>--Mike K.
>
>
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--
Roger Taylor
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