 |
 |
I should have noted that my comment, "not highly portable", had little to do with language issues and a lot to do with the coding priorities of the programmers. As someone who regularly uses a Macintosh (and an SGI with IRIX 6.2) I am aware of all the assumptions about the environment that can reduce the portability of code. As most developers of such tools typically have access to only a few systems, and developed their tools for their own use, absolute portability was not a high priority. README files and documentation for the tools typically indicate that porting has only been attempted for a few Unix based systems, that on many Unix systems gcc is required, that operation assumes a command line interface, that porting to IRIX 6.2 has not been attempted (suggesting that they have assumed that long is the largest integer size), that the character set is assumed to be ISO/Latin-1, that the tools rely on the availability of other tools, e.g., Perl, Tcl/Tk, YACC, etc. I suggest a visit to dejanews and a search on 'long long' in comp.std.c to get a grasp of some of the portability problems facing C developers. %%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%