Re: Standard Ada Preprocessor (Was: why ada is so unpopular ?)

[Marin David Condic <nobody@noplace.com>]

Probably because it was widely ignored by implementers and hence pretty 
close to useless. In a perfect world, all compilers would recognize 
platform differences and correct for them so you had 100% portable code 
- but this is not likely to happen while I'm above ground. Its really 
pretty hopeless to expect that a compiler writer can forsee *all* 
platform differences and deal with them via some abstraction, so you 
have to leave it in the hands of the developer. Somehow, the developer 
needs to detect and code around such platform differences.

MDC



Leon Winslow wrote:
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> 
> I'm interested in knowing why no one has mentioned that 40 years ago the
> COBAL language included a statement to specify the machine and/or
> operating system for the executable code.  If you wanted the program to
> run on a UNIX box, you essentially entered UNIX at the head of the
> program; if you wanted it to run on a Windows box you entered Windows.
> The rest of the program remained the same.  (Its been a long time since
> I used this feature so I don't remember the exact syntax.  Maybe someone
> else knows?)
> 
> Of course, very few compilers actually implemented more than one
> option.  If you wanted a different one, you usually needed a different
> compiler.
> 
> The important feature however is that the rest of the program was
> independent of the machine that would execute the program.  If COBAL
> could implement this 40 years ago, why can't we try something similar?
> 
> 
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