In article <3DC943CF.84A68F32 / san.rr.com>, Darren New <dnew / san.rr.com>
writes
>Robin Becker wrote:
>> Funnily enough they kept telling me that as soon as I switched to
>> F99/C++ etc etc that everything would be portable.
>
>Your confusion is in thinking that "portable" is a binary value. Fortran
>was certainly more portable than assembler, as was C. Tcl is certainly
>more portable than Fortran or C. 
>
>The other problem, of course, is that people keep improving their
>capabilities, so what was portable is no longer adequate. Fortran is
>quite portable, as long as you don't want to do 3D graphics driven by a
>data glove.
>
>As long as you don't want to do development in multiple languages or
>dynamically load code safely over the net into some other OS process,
>Tcl and Python are pretty good choices. Otherwise, you might want to
>consider C# or Java. 
>
>See how it works? :-)
yes you claim to have a better mousetrap :) and suddenly ther are
1.5.2/2.0/2.1/2.2/2.3a1 versions of Python and 6.4/7.1....8.4 of Tcl and
I must buy the right C compiler or OS or things don't really quite port
oh well there you go.

English was portable until everyone started using it ;)
-- 
Robin Becker