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On 18 May 2014 11:27, Tom <madtom1999@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote: > On 17/05/14 22:35, Philip Hudson wrote: >> >> On 17 May 2014 21:34, Gordon Henderson <gordon+lug@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote: >>> >>> No, but I've programmed in C on both. Can't say I noticed any difference. >> >> Ever tried the built-in (reluctantly, I'd say) C compiler on a VAX? >> > What was wrong with that? Mind you I learned my C on that - and a Superbrain > with an EIL problem. If you *learned* C on that, it was probably fine -- though I bet the K&R book wasn't your tutorial. The trouble with it came for anyone who learned their C anywhere else. There were at the time two "standards", colloquially known as K&R (after the book) and ANSI (after the, er, standard). There was also Borland's Turbo C, which was widely understood to be in a world of its own, and not for malicious or incompetent reasons, though I think in the end even Borland admitted they shouldn't have changed the language as they did. Anyway, the VAX C compiler would not compile a non-trivial program that compiled on C compilers for either K&R or ANSI C on all other platforms. This was late '80s, early '90s. My example was a dumb tree for a dictionary with recursive-descent search and insert functions which I co-wrote with my brother for a college assignment he had. No external libraries, nothing but stdlib and stdio. Compiled and ran as expected without tweaking on Mac, DOS, SunOS and Dynix; took hours and hours of porting on VMS. I don't know what the solution was in the end, I had to head off and leave it to my brother. -- Phil Hudson http://hudson-it.no-ip.biz @UWascalWabbit PGP/GnuPG ID: 0x887DCA63 -- The Mailing List for the Devon & Cornwall LUG http://mailman.dclug.org.uk/listinfo/list FAQ: http://www.dcglug.org.uk/listfaq