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From: peter@sugar.hackercorp.com (Peter da Silva)
Subject: Re: 8-bit death
Message-ID: <1991May30.145207.23572@sugar.hackercorp.com>
Organization: Sugar Land Unix -- Houston, TX
References: <1991May27.130057.27121@sugar.hackercorp.com> <mykes.2950@amiga0.SF-Bay.ORG> <og9Hk52h@cs.psu.edu>
Date: Thu, 30 May 1991 14:52:07 GMT

In article <og9Hk52h@cs.psu.edu> melling@cs.psu.edu (Michael D Mellinger) writes:
> Just ftp to prep.ai.mit.edu and grab some GNU software and
> see how many machines the software runs on(some of it is more portable
> than others).  If GNU Smalltalk or Bison were written in assembler,
> how easy would it be to port them to a dozen different machines?

And keep in mind that most of the GNU software out there is extremely bad code
from the point of view of portability. RMS has a great deal of disdain for
16 bit machines, and none of this code was written with any idea of ever
porting it to anything less than a VAX. This is true of both RMS code, and
the code of the other people in the FSF... the attitude has proven contagious.

So when Mike here is pointing to the GNU code as "portable", keep in mind that
what he's pointing to is not any sort of ideal. It's just typical C code.
-- 
Peter da Silva.   `-_-'
<peter@sugar.hackercorp.com>.
