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Date:      20 Feb 1999 02:41:15 +0100
From:      Simon J Mudd <sjmudd@bitmailer.net>
To:        freebsd-newbies@freebsd.org
Subject:   Re: Very Common Question
Message-ID:  <lwpv75onr8.fsf@phoenix.ea4els.ampr.org>
In-Reply-To: "G. Adam Stanislav"'s message of "20 Feb 1999 02:06:35 %2B0100"
References:  <3.0.6.32.19990219112625.008c5290@mail.bfm.org>

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"G. Adam Stanislav" <zen@buddhist.com> writes:

> By the same token, more Unix programmers probably have Linux installed than
> FreeBSD, so they write software for what they have and are familiar with.

This is sad (I imply you are talking about writing software for
__linux__), because people should be writing software which works on
unix, and is portable between unix systems.  Few people are good at
writing portable unix code, though this is partly because their are
few books on it (and O'reilly's book doesn't tell you how to _write_
portable unix code).  I know that apart from different header files
there are several other differences between the different unix
vendors, but unix's weekness has simply been the lack of code which
runs on any unix platform.  Obviously good code is written by people
who have learnt how to do this, but a lot of code I've seen is written
with #ifdef's written everywhere; few people write code like I've seen
in postfix (Wietse's superfast MTA), very nice and clear.

For those of us (myself included) starting something new it is far
from clear how to write code this way, and if I have only one system
(linux) to test it on then it's not surprising that I write
non-portable code.  Maybe one day I'll get over this hurdle.

Simon
--
Simon J Mudd, Madrid SPAIN  Tel: +34-91-559 2854  email: sjmudd@bitmailer.net
[short messages - from radio hams only]     ---->      ea4els@ea4els.ampr.org


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