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What does the C standard say about portability?

Tamiryan Michael

Hello,

See here:

www.open-std.org/.../C99RationaleV5.10.pdf

Is it possible that "Jack Sprat", the staunch defender of the C standard as the ultimate reference when writing programs, missed the following statement?

C code can be non-portable.  Although it strove to give programmers the opportunity to write
truly portable programs, the C89 Committee did not want to force programmers into writing
portably, to preclude the use of C as a “high-level assembler”:  the ability to write machine-
35  specific code is one of the strengths of C.  It is this principle which largely motivates drawing the
distinction between strictly conforming program and conforming program (§4).

this is precisely what Per Westermark has been saying.
Exactly what Erik Malund has been saying.
Remember: Jack Sprat claims often that writing a program that complies with the C standard is a GUARANTEE for its correct functioning.

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  • 0 in reply to Andy Neil

    "Which is very different from,"

    I wouldn't worry too much about it: michael's inability to comprehend even rudimentary things is legendary and well documented.

    asking her to understand such refined topics does sound too much.

    "Note that very important "if"!"

    well, what "standard"? what compiler? and what hardware? I think there are plenty of cases in the real world that even if you wrote a piece of code that's guaranteed by a particular standard, the resulting code may not behave exactly as the standard would suggest, due to bugs in the standard / compilers / hardware / etc.

    "Or, as in my example, when people write code that the standard defines to do something other than what they wanted. ie, the programmer wrote the wrong code."

    yes, that's a far bigger issue I think.

Reply
  • 0 in reply to Andy Neil

    "Which is very different from,"

    I wouldn't worry too much about it: michael's inability to comprehend even rudimentary things is legendary and well documented.

    asking her to understand such refined topics does sound too much.

    "Note that very important "if"!"

    well, what "standard"? what compiler? and what hardware? I think there are plenty of cases in the real world that even if you wrote a piece of code that's guaranteed by a particular standard, the resulting code may not behave exactly as the standard would suggest, due to bugs in the standard / compilers / hardware / etc.

    "Or, as in my example, when people write code that the standard defines to do something other than what they wanted. ie, the programmer wrote the wrong code."

    yes, that's a far bigger issue I think.

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