[geeks] And The Linux Weenies Wonder Why They Aren't Mainstream...`

[der Mouse]

> It could be a 32bit SPARC and a 64bit Lintel box.

Ah yes, I'd forgotten about x64.

> But, I wasn't really considering 64bit issues.  I guess that two
> different 32bit boxs might only shake out 90% of the issues rather
> than 95%.

True enough - so much (most?) code contains so many much more blatant
horrors that this is, comparatively, a minor niggle.

>> Of course, if you really want to do a good job of portability
>> testing, throw in some even less "standard" machines, like, say, a
>> PDP-10 (or more likely a simulator) and a Lisp Machine.
> Well, that would be optimal, but I'm not aware of anyone even
> desiring to port current software to PDP-10s or C code to lisp
> machines.

Well, I do.  (To be sure, not because I want to use it there.  But I
suspect I have a number of nonportabilities in my code that I've never
realized, stuff that a machine with a non-power-of-two wordsize, or a
non-byte-addressed machine, might wake me up to.)

> It certainly would be educational to try though.  I keep thwacking at
> a guy here for making assumptions he can always freely convert
> pointers to ints.

Oh, he can.  He's just not guaranteed to get anything useful. :-)  (I
think the Lisp Machine C implementation converts pointers to ints by
throwing away the array part of the <array,index> pair, or some such.
Or maybe it just converts all pointers to 0....)

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