POV-Ray : Newsgroups : povray.off-topic : This is great : Re: This is great Server Time
5 Sep 2024 17:16:24 EDT (-0400)
  Re: This is great  
From: Darren New
Date: 21 Aug 2009 11:59:07
Message: <4a8ec44b$1@news.povray.org>
Invisible wrote:
> (Notice that guy who said he couldn't just add a new integer field to a 
> data structure because it would break a few thousand other functions? 
> Does that sound like good abstraction you to?)

I think that was a few thousand callback functions. I.e., when an event 
happened, it called you with "process_your_event(int1, int2, voidp)" and 
you'd have to recode all those headers.

(Honestly, I think that would be rather easy, myself.)

> I was also puzzled when I looked at Gentoo and discovered just how many 
> C programs break horribly just because they were written for IA-32 and 
> got recompiled for AMD64.

Yep. The problem with C is that it offers you the machine's capabilities and 
you pick which of them you want. In Ada, for example, you tell it the range 
of values you want to handle, and it picks the appropriate machine 
structure.  C is only portable to the extent you write multiple versions of 
the source code in the same file.

-- 
   Darren New, San Diego CA, USA (PST)
   "We'd like you to back-port all the changes in 2.0
    back to version 1.0."
   "We've done that already. We call it 2.0."


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