Re: Ada The Best Language?

[Darren New <dnew@san.rr.com>]

Ted Dennison wrote:
> 
> In article <3B57676A.AB47237B@san.rr.com>, Darren New says...
> >
> >And of course, the fact that I can run the same executable on DOS,
> >Win3.1, Win98, WinNT, and Win2000 means nothing either. Sure.
> 
> Actually, that's rarely the case. I think Win3.1 has a different exe format than
> the rest. Even the Win32 OS'es have quite a few library differences between
> them. If there are examples of this, they must be pretty simple programs.

They have simple requirements. For example, I've been using the same
jpeg compression routines since before Win3.1 was available. (Before it
was available to me, at least. It might have been out there somewhere.)
Read a file, write a file kind of stuff. Anything that does stdio.h type
stuff works fine.

> Certianly none of the 50 or so PC games I own have this capability.

Games kind of tend to push the edge on what's legal programming and
such, and they tend not to worry about whether they'll still run without
changes in 5 years. I'd bet, however, that a PC game for Win3.1 is more
likely to run under Win98 without recompiling than a UNIX game for Linux
is likely to run under HP/UX or Solaris without recompiling. :-)

-- 
Darren New / Senior MTS & Free Radical / Invisible Worlds Inc.
       San Diego, CA, USA (PST).  Cryptokeys on demand.
          Only a WIMP puts wallpaper on his desktop.