Re: ANSI C compliance

From: Thomas Matthews (Thomas_MatthewsHatesSpam_at_sbcglobal.net)
Date: 11/05/03 

Date: Wed, 05 Nov 2003 20:10:24 GMT

Mark Gordon wrote:

> On Wed, 05 Nov 2003 07:43:49 GMT
> "Roose" <nospam@nospam.nospam> wrote:
>
>
>>Let me thank you first for making a reasoned argument. My time is not
>>unlimited, so let me ignore the vast majority of responses and focus
>>on the ones such as this that rely logical argument -- AND acknowledge
>>the existence of life outside the newsgroup.
>>
>>"Steve Summit" <scs@eskimo.com> wrote in message
>>news:bo9l11$ig1$1@eskinews.eskimo.com...
>>
>>>Roose wrote:
>>>
> Such instances are few and far between in my experience. Equally, my
> experience is that writing code to be as portable as possible can often
> save you time *BEFORE* you reach the deadline.
>
> A REAL example:
> Writing a significant chunk of embedded code. Since the code was as
> portable as possible I ended up porting it to a Silicon Graphics
> workstation and debugging it there because there were far better tools
> available including the ability to read some aircraft attitude data and
> the digitised video and overlay a line of the video indicating where my
> software believed the horizon was. This saved a significant amount of
> time on that particular project.
>

In support, another Real World example:
I was working on code for an embedded laser printer. The task was
page control (sequencing, and resource aquisition). The code was
based on data input. Since resources were tight (i.e. 5 people shared
the same printer to work on), writing in ANSI C code allowed me to
debug the code on the PC using a debugger to single step through
the code (and setting appropriate variables). This debugging
process was often faster than trying to debug using the proprietary
debugger after waiting many hours for free time on a printer.

One note: Many of the real world programs have code that is platform
dependent. However, those portions can be confined to their own
modules and replaced by "stubs" for other platforms. In my case,
I used some stubs for platform specific functionality. 

-- 
Thomas Matthews
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