From owner-freebsd-newbies Sat Feb 20 1: 5: 2 1999 Delivered-To: freebsd-newbies@freebsd.org Received: from phoenix.ea4els.ampr.org (usuxtrn099.bitmailer.es [195.16.159.99]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id 8A4B311352 for ; Sat, 20 Feb 1999 01:04:51 -0800 (PST) (envelope-from sjmudd@bitmailer.net) Received: by phoenix.ea4els.ampr.org (Postfix, from userid 507) id 8641856CD; Sat, 20 Feb 1999 02:41:16 +0100 (MET) To: freebsd-newbies@freebsd.org Subject: Re: Very Common Question References: <3.0.6.32.19990219112625.008c5290@mail.bfm.org> From: Simon J Mudd Date: 20 Feb 1999 02:41:15 +0100 In-Reply-To: "G. Adam Stanislav"'s message of "20 Feb 1999 02:06:35 +0100" Message-ID: Lines: 27 X-Mailer: Gnus v5.5/Emacs 20.3 Sender: owner-freebsd-newbies@FreeBSD.ORG Precedence: bulk X-Loop: FreeBSD.org "G. Adam Stanislav" 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 To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-newbies" in the body of the message