What I'm Doing

Wednesday, January 30, 2008

Portability

I've been re-reading some of the first chapters of Programming Perl, and came across this gem of a paragraph on portability:
Initially designed as a glue language for Unix, Perl has long since spread to most other operating systems. Because it runs nearly everywhere, Perl is one of the most portable programming environments available today. To program C or C++ portably, you have to put in all those strange #ifdef markings for different operating systems. To program Java portably, you have to understand the idiosyncrasies of each new Java implementation. To program a shell script portably, you have to remember the syntax for each operating system's version of each command and somehow find the common factor that (you hope) works everywhere. And to program Visual Basic portably, you just need a more flexible definition of the word "portable". :-)

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