[ntp:questions] Dual-core systems - AMD - Windows Vista

Richard B. Gilbert rgilbert88 at comcast.net
Sun Dec 9 16:18:49 UTC 2007


David J Taylor wrote:
> Richard B. Gilbert wrote:
> []
> 
>>That can be extremely difficult to achieve over multiple platforms and
>>compilers.
> 
> 
> Multi-platform must make zero warnings many times more difficult - I can 
> appreciate that.
> 
> 
>>It is made more difficult because various compiler accept different
>>deviations from the standard.  I believe that gcc is notorious for
>>that and there may well be others.
> 
> 
> Standards - don't you love it when there are so many to choose from!
> 
> 
>>In the days when I was porting Unixish C code to OpenVMS, I used the
>>compiler options that demanded "maximum rectitude" for compliance with
>>the then ANSI standard. (I believe the standard changed several times
>>since I last did this.)  This found a couple of actual bugs and quite
>>a bit of what I considered "sleazy coding" which I did my best to
>>clean up.  I added zillions of missing function declarations,
>>corrected function declarations that falsely claimed that a function
>>returned something that it did not or vice versa. . . .
> 
> 
> I know I much prefer the far fewer variants of Windows compared to the 
> multiplicity of versions of Linux - people were demanding exactly this 
> version of that release with those options.  Oh, and they had different 
> package mechanisms as well!  Not good for a very small software team.
> 
> Actually having two different teams working to the same document can lead 
> to good results, though.  I recall how the folks in VMS writing the 
> equivalent of "chkdsk" would check disks produced by the OS writers, and 
> find how different folk had interpreted different fields.  I try for 
> clarity rather than cleverness when coding.  

An excellent goal.

>I may even have to maintain 
> the code myself!
> 

Few of us are lucky enough to find someone else willing/able to maintain 
our code!!  I always felt that if something needed maintenance, nobody 
else was going to do it.  I tried to write code that I would be 
willing/able to maintain.  I  would expect to be able to maintain 
FORTRAN code I wrote thirty years ago.  I used meaningful variable names 
and commented liberally.  I preferred the simple and direct to the 
clever and obscure.





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