SCO 6 (RE: FW: The grand finale)

[Bill Campbell]

On Sat, Nov 12, 2005, Fairlight wrote:
>At Fri, Nov 11, 2005 at 10:07:15AM -0500 or thereabouts, 
>suspect Kenneth Brody was observed uttering:
>> However, if your script doesn't start with "#!/bin/sh" (and, honestly,
>> how many of you always put the shell there?), and it depends on some
>
>-ALWAYS-.
>
>Unix Programming Rule #1:  Never assume any specific environment exists.
>
>This is especially painful for people that write mail filters, cron jobs,
>etc., that soon (or possibly not-so-soon) learn their environment is not
>what they assumed it would be.  It's just as painful in situations like
>this though.

Programming Rule #2: Never use proprietary vendor ``enhancements''

These can cause immense problems when the software needs to be
moved to a new environment.  The first time I ran into this was
when I used non-standard return processing in a FORTRAN program.
Then there was the time I had to get a ``standard'' FORTRAN
program working on a system where the programmer had used their
vendors non-standard 7 character variable name limit.  That
sounds like a small thing, but it was a major PITA in the days of
punch cards and editing was done by reading listings on 14in
green bar printer paper.

One problem here is that people learning a language often don't
know what is standard and what's not.  I learned COBOL on
Burroughs Medium Systems where the language was fully recursive
on a stack based machine.  I had some very ``interesting''
experiences when I had to port the programs to IBM which didn't
support recursion.  My brother learned FORTRAN on a machine which
allowed recursive calls, and had immense fun porting 3D graphics
software that took advantage of that.

Bill
--
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