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Re: zsh and portability
- X-seq: zsh-workers 1210
- From: Zoltan Hidvegi <hzoli@xxxxxxxxxx>
- To: coleman@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx (Richard Coleman)
- Subject: Re: zsh and portability
- Date: Tue, 28 May 1996 13:44:04 +0200 (MET DST)
- Cc: zsh-workers@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
- In-reply-to: <199605272316.TAA12028@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> from Richard Coleman at "May 27, 96 07:16:33 pm"
- Organization: Dept. of Comp. Sci., Eotvos University, Budapest, Hungary
- Phone: (36 1)2669833 ext: 2667, home phone: (36 1) 2752368
> There been a lot of talk in the last couple of days about
> various assumptions that zsh makes (NULL has all zero bits,
> or char has 8 bits, etc..).
>
> My suggestion would be to not worry too much about such things unless
> they become a problem. I want zsh to be portable as well, but not at
> the expense of needlessly complicating the code for machines that zsh
> will probably not run on anyway.
>
> In any portable unix software, you must make assumptions that are not
> guaranteed by any standard (ANSI C, POSIX, whatever). I don't think
> anything is wrong with this (withing reason). If the code is kept
> clean and well documented, and someone REALLY wants to run zsh on an
> OS that goes against these assumptions, then they could can port it
> themselves without too much trouble.
>
> I think time could be better spent documenting the assumptions that
> are made, rather than adding more complexity in the name of
> portability.
>
> Remember. Keep things as simple as possible. I will of course,
> repeat this mantra on a regular basis.
I agree, but if a change is simple and trivial, and improves portability
than it would be usefull to add.
Also I think that in the near future there will be systems where
sizeof(long) > sizeof(void*). The other problems will probably not come up
on modern systems but this one has to be handled somehow. In other words
we need a portable method to initialise a union.
Zoltan
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