On Sat, 30 Sep 2006, Ben Collver wrote:
> As far as Chuck is concerned, I am not worthy.  But he said something
> that caught my eye.  "I'm not interested in recoding C applications. My
> experience indicates that most applications are hardware-dependent."
> What does he mean?  That solutions to problems tend to involve specific
> hardware, and that portability is over-rated?

Operating Systems exist to provide abstract, hardware-*independent* 
interfaces to applications. Without that, we'd get the kind of 
"portability" common in the Windows-world, where a "portable" application 
runs on Window 95, NT *and* XP. This can't be real...

See also my article ``What Makes An Operating System "Portable"?''
at http://www.feyrer.de/NetBSD/portability/portability.html.


  - Hubert