Re: An Old Market in which Ada May Play

["Marin David Condic" <marin.condic.auntie.spam@pacemicro.com>]

There is often a myopic view of the universe that goes along with many users
of Unix-like OS's. Sometimes they see the universe as ***UNIX*** and a
handful of other curious but totally useless and insignificant products.
Sometimes the view is that EVERYBODY LOVES ***UNIX***!!! and the only people
who might register any complaints about it are the two or three people in
the whole universe who use those curious but totally useless and
insignificant other products. Portability thus begins to mean "I
successfully moved it from one flavor of Unix to another flavor of Unix".
True portability is really something much more difficult to achieve. (And
having "portability" between two or more flavors of Unix being a "Big Deal"
is itself a condemnation of Unix. It ought to be *trivial* to move code from
one Unix box to another - but apparently not.)

I have often encountered a similar attitude from people from New York. There
is ***NEW***YORK*** and there is "flyover country" that doesn't matter much.
Perhaps it comes from being "big" - everything smaller becomes viewed as
unimportant.

MDC
--
Marin David Condic
Senior Software Engineer
Pace Micro Technology Americas    www.pacemicro.com
Enabling the digital revolution
e-Mail:    marin.condic@pacemicro.com
Web:      http://www.mcondic.com/


"Larry Kilgallen" <Kilgallen@eisner.decus.org.nospam> wrote in message
news:oEteewPzyKZ9@eisner.encompasserve.org...
> In article <3B2D5BA7.C7F6CCC3@linuxchip.demon.co.uk>, Dr Adrian Wrigley
<amtw@linuxchip.demon.co.uk> writes:
>
> I would be frightened by the claim on that site:
>
> It is tested on SGI IRIX 6.5 and Linux 2.0.36, but
> should be easily portable to other platforms.
>
> Let's see, it was tested on two operating systems and both of them were
> of the Unix style.  What is wrong with this picture ?
>
> It is not just that I distrust the portability claim, but I distrust
> any source so naive as to make it.  Please make a fuss when the list
> of operating systems covered include MacOS 68K, Be, VMS, OS/400 and
> MVS.  Then I will believe the developers have sufficient breadth of
> experience to make a claim about "easily portable".