Zortech "limitation"

[Walter Bright]

In article <48aa63d6.20b6d at apollo.HP.COM> nelson_p at apollo.HP.COM (Peter Nelson) writes:
<   Languages achieve portability by allowing the programmer to 
<   write his code in a way which is not dependent on the architectual
<   whims or affectations of a particular hardware vendor.

	To achieve portability you must code to the common denominator between
	all the platforms. Note that I don't know of any reasonable method
	to implement on the 8086 things like:
		func()
		{	char array[70000];
			...
		}
	The 8086 hardware simply doesn't support it.

<   In principle I ought to be
<   able to take a program which I wrote on my HP/Apollo DN10000
<   and port it to my PC or my friend's Mac or my wife's DG Aviion just
<   by recompiling it.   This is NOT achieved by making the Aviion, PC,
<   or Mac look like a DN10000.  

	Unless you adhere to portable constructs, making the PC look
	like a DN10000 is the only way.

	Zortech's philosophy is to allow the developer to create a PC
	product with maximum speed/size efficiency. In order to do this,
	the behavior of the compiler matches the behavior of the
	underlying machine. Fighting the compiler and the PC environment
	is counterproductive to producing a PC application.

	Obviously, you disagree with this point of view. I suspect that
	with your philosophy, Smalltalk is a better language for you than
	C++.