[Oberon] Portability - language vs libraries vs environments

[August Karlstrom]

chris at cfbsoftware.com wrote:
>>-----Original Message-----
>>From: oberon-bounces at lists.inf.ethz.ch 
>>[mailto:oberon-bounces at lists.inf.ethz.ch] On Behalf Of August 
>>Karlstrom
>>Sent: Thursday, 16 March 2006 7:54 AM
>>To: ETH Oberon and related systems
>>Subject: Re: [Oberon] Trivialising formality considered harmful
>>
>>
>>Anyway, Oberon-2 is an excellent design as it is. Let's use it! 
>>Personally I don't need additional experimental features. I 
>>would like 
>>Oberon to be (as least) as portable as C.
>>
> 
> 
> Be careful to distinguish between language, libraries and platforms when
> referring to portability. In my experience (i.e. maintaining a major
> C-based application in the 80's and 90's on DOS, Unix, Xenix, VMS,
> Solaris, HP-UX and AIX), the language Oberon is infinitely more portable
> than the language C.

When I say C is portable I mean that standard C with its standard 
library is portable across operating systems and compilers if you write 
a program that makes no assumptions about the underlying platform.

> Any claims of portability of C are directly-related to the portability
> of the Unix library itself. However, this also diminished rapidly when
> Unix eventually diverged into its various incompatible forms. 
> 
> It was also far easier to achieve portability when dealing with
> command-line applications and dumb terminals rather than today's complex
> interfaces.

Cross platform libraries are commonplace (OpenGL, SDL and wxWidgets 
comes to mind).