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000033_icon-group-sender _Mon May 18 12:44:00 1998.msg
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Date: Mon, 18 May 1998 11:01:53 -0500
From: Charles Hethcoat <CHETHCOA@oss.oceaneering.com>
To: icon-group@optima.CS.Arizona.EDU
Subject: Re: Annoying things
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Iain Alexander wrote:
>I imagine Icon has no real choice other than to use the Windows system()
interface directly, and all this weirdness is down to the latter.
The recent announcement of Unicon has me thinking. I believe the Icon
community should set a more explicit goal of insuring portability between
systems, including weird ones. (Naturally, a lot of the porting headaches
involve coping with Windows.)
Right now there are two Windows systems out there: Windows 95 and NT.
They both are "Win32", but are very different underneath, apparently. I
imagine most of the Windows comments made on this group pertain to Win95,
but WinNT may be more important from a corporate-visibility viewpoint.
Anyway, I don't think the portability issues for these two OSs are the
same.
Concerning NT: There is an interesting article in the June 1998 issue of
Performance Computing (nee Unix Review): "Architecture of POSIX and
OpenNT". This discusses the low-level system design of the OpenNT
product, which is a port of UNIX to run over the NT kernel. IMHO, it
raises some interesting questions about the correct strategy for assuring
software portability between Unix and Windows NT. (Especially now that we
Icon types have Unicon.) A quote: "This article discusses some of the
hurdles...a narrowly focused development community may be fueling
erroneous perceptions about about portability between the two platforms."
Their approach: OpenNT just bypasses most of the Win32 junk, and the
related porting problems, and works directly to the Windows NT kernel. It
seems that Unicon could run on NT with almost no changes if a similar
approach were used.
Concerning Win 95: One solution would seem to be to implement minimal
POSIX capabilities into or alongside the Win32 layer...at least enough to
permit Unicon to work on it. I envision a replacement for the DOS
window...call it, oh, let's just say Winix (TM ;^). It need not be a full
UNIX system. It would be installed like 4DOS or other DOS replacement
shells. Once installed, the necessary hooks would be there for Unicon to
run.
Apropos of portability, does anyone remember the Software Tools Users
Group? Portability was their thing. In the days before C became
universally available, they (we, for I was one of them) used to run a very
consistent, very Unix-like programming layer on systems as diverse as
OS/370, Primos, VMS, and Harris Vulcan (!). All implemented in Fortran.
Cheers,
Charles Hethcoat
Oceaneering Space Systems, Inc.
16665 Space Center Blvd., Houston, Texas 77058 USA
chethcoa@oss.oceaneering.com
Voice: 281-228-5568 Fax: 281-488-2027