Verily didst Tansin A. Darcos & Company rise up and spake thus:
 
> Are you sure?  You're saying that the internet address and domain name of
> a site is already pre-loaded into sendmail or that it automatically knows
> where it is or what system it is on?  Interesting.
 
Yes, it knows what system it is running on.
 
> 15 Years ago Standard Pascal suffered from severe limitations in it
> including the lack of standard string handling, random file I/O and
> terminal control plus inability to reach the hardware closely.  The
> Turbo Pascal series of compilers will do anything on a PC that you
> can do in the C language and do it cleaner.
 
> I will give the benefit of the doubt and say that - at best - the
> two languages are about equal in terms of portability for any
> non-hardware specific applcations.  For ones that do very specific
> hardware access, I will claim that a program written in C is going
> to be much harder to port than one written in Pascal, if the facilities
> are available on both machines.
 
Huh?  Hardware-specific is hardware-specific.  By definition it means
non-portable.  You're saying that something non-portable in one
language is easier to port than something non-portable in the other
language?  It doesn't matter which language it is, if you're doing
something hardware-specific you'll have a hard time porting it.
 
I would believe that fewer hardware-specific Pascal programs have
been written than C programs, but that's because of the historical
Standard Pascal limitations you mention above.  The wondrous
TurboPascal extensions have inspired MANY programs that don't
stand a snowball's chance in the Sahara of being ported to another
platform.
 
Let's face it, folks: bad coding practices are bad coding practices.
If you do something non-portable where you shouldn't, you're a poor
programmer.  There is nothing endemic in either language that
forces you into such things.
 
> The other thing that mainframes can be used for is the stuff that Novell
> is making money off of: servers and such.  If they can figure a way to
> allow those large 370s with huge disk capacity plus all that I/O bamdwidth
> for line printers and tape drives, to efficiently be used for the transfer
> of files, mail and the loading of applications, there will be even more
> need to keep them around.  Not otherwise.
 
Absolutely!  What's been killing the mainframes is not that they are too
big; it's the exclusive mindset and orientation.   There will always be
a market for high horsepower; now it's down to which high-end machines
will cooperate with all the other machines you own.  For example,
the top-end HP9000/800s are essentially mainframes but nobody calls
them that.
 
- Alan
 
----                                                            ,,,,
Alan Millar            [log in to unmask]              __oo  \
System Administrator                                           =___/
Abortion stops a beating heart