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From: kilgallen@eisner.decus.org (Larry Kilgallen)
Subject: Portable Code (was: CRC in Ada?)
Date: 1997/03/24
Message-ID: <1997Mar24.081622.1@eisner>#1/1
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Date: 1997-03-24T00:00:00+00:00
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In article <3335D8F0.106F@bix.com>, Tom Moran <tmoran@bix.com> writes:
> Sorry, 
>> couldn't read a sequential file
> should have said "couldn't read an existing sequential file".  Having
> learned Ada after leaving school, I was interested in using it in the
> real world, not in a classroom excercise.  I assume there are others who
> are doing real tasks and might give Ada a try, but not much of one if
> Ada appears, rightly or wrongly, highly unsuitable.

I think there is a dichotomy of specification standards, in that
those discussing Ada often presume "in a portable fashion" as
being a requirement.  Over and over again I read messages from
C programmers who are shocked that their traditional IO methods
cannot read an "ordinary" VMS file without resorting to particular
OS-specific file opening methods. Discussions in c.l.a tend to
favor consideration of portability _before_ the source code
is first written.  That approach is not appropriate in the C
world, which has a cultural bias toward "knowing" that every
operating system will be "Unix" (whatever that means this month).

For "real-world" problems in Ada based on an existing environment,
it is quite possible to write non-portable code.  Ada is quite fine
for writing bales of code full of calls to highly non-portable VMS
system services.  I bet it works just as with non-portable calls to
OS/2. Consideration of a language should not be biased by the fact
that the problem itself does not admit of a portable solution.

If you think C is better than Ada for portable code, please first
make sure your C program never uses "#if<whatever>" for platform
distinctions.  Otherwise we are not talking about portable source
but rather how the non-portable source is arranged into files.

Larry Kilgallen