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