[Info-vax] misstatement of Unix origin [was Re: A portable VMS, was: Re: OS Ancestry]

[Bill Gunshannon]

On 5/24/21 7:58 PM, Dave Froble wrote:
> On 5/24/2021 2:05 PM, Simon Clubley wrote:
>> On 2021-05-24, John Wallace <johnwallace4 at yahoo.co.uk> wrote:
>>> On 24/05/2021 13:28, Simon Clubley wrote:
>>>>
>>>> Yes, oops. :-) Somebody already reminded me about this a few days ago
>>>> and as I pointed out in response this just shows how much more portable
>>>> things are when you are using an implemention language not tied to the
>>>> architecture.
>>>>
>>>
>>> Yeah sure, UNIX code was so portable that back in the 1980s anything
>>> much more complex than "Hello World" had little chance of being portable
>>> between (e.g.) BSD and System V even on the very same hardware.
>>>
>>> When the two main camps can't even agree on the basics of opening a file
>>> from C,
>>> as in fd = open(...),
>>> it's no wonder there was a customer/vendor need for a Single UNIX
>>> Specification.
>>>
>>> Fortunately times have moved on since then.
>>
>> You are confusing functionality of an operating system with the
>> portability of an operating system between architectures.
>>
>> Your comments above talk about functionality within an operating
>> system. I am talking about the ease of porting an operating system
>> from one architecture to another.
>>
>> The choice of implementation language does not decide the functionality
>> of an operating system. It is however a major factor in how easy or not
>> it is to port that operating system to another architecture.
> 
> Even when (hawk, spit, gag) C doesn't work the same on different 
> architectures?
> 

Got any good examples?  Are you sure it wasn't just a bad
implementation?

bill