On Tue, 16 Apr 2002, at 2:21pm, [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
> In order for UltraScan to run under Linux or OSX or BSD all you need 
> is:
>       a. the source for UltraScan
>       b. a decent compiler (gcc ought to do)
>       c. a UNIX based OS.

  That is rather an over-simplification.  I have no idea what UltraScan is,
but if it requires something that is only available for Linux (like a
particular system call), it will not run anywhere else.  Dependencies on
various libraries and such could make things difficult (albeit not
impossible) on non-Linux systems.

  UltraScan may contain assumptions about the hardware it will run on.  
That is not unlikely; I would say the majority of non-trivial C programs in
existence make such assumptions [1].  Byte-ordering and pointer-size are
just the most popular ones.

  On the other end of the spectrum, if UltraScan is sufficiently vanilla, it
might even run on non-Unix systems.  Microsoft Windows NT/2000, Digital's
VMS, and IBM's OS/390 all have POSIX subsystems, for example.

> If the application in question was portably written in the first place,
> the compiler should be able to take care of any necessary 'endian'
> swapping, since that's all done at a much lower level than the C code.

  Ha.  Ha.  Ha.  :-)


Footnotes
---------
[1] Note that 47% of all statistics are made up on the spot.

-- 
Ben Scott <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
| The opinions expressed in this message are those of the author and do not |
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| organization.  All information is provided without warranty of any kind.  |


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