I was involved in creating some standards in my life, some of them were used, others were left to die in my hard-drive. I must say that working on a standard is a real HELL!!! While reading a standard is sometimes boring, writing one can kill you. A standard is a set of rules widely used and implemented. There is no point for having a standard if it is not WIDELY used. An example for this is the Smalltalk language: Any diffrent implementation is COMPLETELY diffrent from any other. It is easier to rewrite the application than to port it from one Smalltalk implementation to another. This problem is now addressed buy http://www.smalltalk.com - but I personaly see almost no progress (especially because I haven't written "real" Smalltalk code for around a year). Realitivily to Smalltalk both C and C++ have standards which are widely implemented. The proof for it is that if you write a simple calculagte application in C or C++ compiling it with another compiler is extremely easy, while a calculator application written in Smalltalk will surely not work with a diffrent implementation, even with minor changes. Not all of the C/C++ standard is followed by all compilers. Usually the commercial compiler follow 99% of the standard but has some extra futures (like BORLAND C/C++). If a hacker makes use of those futures than porting the code will usually require non-minor changes to the code. The gnu compiler, g++, doesn't add any special futures to the languages and stirctly follows the standard (for all of you stupid guys: A C++ guru told this!). This makes code written in g++ pritty easy portable (my own exprience with a pretty big project). Some compilers (like BORLAND) add very stange futures which make the code importable. For example, in one compiler I once used you could do something like this: i = new int[i_a][i_b]; while in g++ I had to chane such things to: i = new int*[i_a]; for (int counter = 0; counter < i_a; counter++) i[counter] = new int[i_b]; Buy, Ilya 'rilel' Khayutin __________________________________________________ Do You Yahoo!? Get Yahoo! Mail – Free email you can access from anywhere! http://mail.yahoo.com/ ================================================================= To unsubscribe, send mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with the word "unsubscribe" in the message body, e.g., run the command echo unsubscribe | mail [EMAIL PROTECTED]
