in reply to Re: "Native Perlish"
in thread "Native Perlish"

I'm sure anyone who'd have to port your code to Windows (or VMS or Mac-pre-OSX or ...) would love you for this.

Jenda
Always code as if the guy who ends up maintaining your code will be a violent psychopath who knows where you live.
   -- Rick Osborne

Edit by castaway: Closed small tag in signature

Replies are listed 'Best First'.
Re: "Native Perlish"
by Abigail-II (Bishop) on Mar 26, 2003 at 21:43 UTC
    I've never worked in a place were there was the smallest chance one of my Perl programs needed to be ported to Windows or any other non-Unix platform.

    However, I've written large shell scripts on Solaris that needed to be ported to both Windows NT and to HP-UX. The port to Windows was *trivial*. One directory needed to be renamed, and we installed a Unix tools package on Windows (I think it was MKS). Porting to HP-UX was actually more work.

    Generally, I don't give a rats ass whether my programs can be easily ported to Windows or not. If you want to cripple yourself running on that platform, be my guest. Don't expect any pity or help from me.

    I'm a toolsmith. I write tools, usually highly specialized tools. Needing to do one particular job, on a particular platform. Portability to non-Unix platforms usually is a non-issue. Besides, there are Unix toolkits for non-Unix systems available. Install them, and your platform will become better.

    Abigail

[reply]

      Sorry Abigail, but I just have to ask this:)

      Excluding simple "it doesn't work the way unix works" examples, can you give one or two ways in which I am crippling myself by using NT rather than (one of the incomprehensibly myriad versions of) unix?

      Examine what is said, not who speaks.
      1) When a distinguished but elderly scientist states that something is possible, he is almost certainly right. When he states that something is impossible, he is very probably wrong.
      2) The only way of discovering the limits of the possible is to venture a little way past them into the impossible
      3) Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.
      Arthur C. Clarke.
[reply]
        You use a system call. Do you know what your kernel is actually doing? That is, do you know how NT works internally?

        Do you have man pages for your tools, system calls, configuration files?

        You have a program, it runs slower than you expected it. You want to know how much time it spends in each system call. Can you do that in NT?

        Your service contract says the service you provide needs to be available 99.999%, 365 x 24. Can NT and its cluster solution provide this?

        Your important application requires at least 16 CPUs and 128 Gb of memory. You want the ability to add, remove and replace CPUs and memory, without the need to reboot.

        Finally, you want to use a script written by Abigail. Abigail doesn't cater for NT. ;-)

        Abigail

[reply]

In Section Meditations