Portability should be the default.
About this quote
- What does it mean?
- Portability should be assumed as the default behavior.
- In plain terms
- Assume code should be portable by default.
- What can you take from it?
- Write code that works across platforms unless a reason not to.
Where it applies
Putting it to work
Questions to consider
- When is non‑portable code justified?
- How does default portability affect performance?
Another view
Sometimes performance or features require platform‑specific code.
More from Larry Wall
And other operators aren't so special syntactically, but weird in other ways, like 'scalar', and 'goto'.
Permalink to quote #170 If this were Ada, I suppose we'd just constant fold 1/0 into die 'Illegal division by zero
Permalink to quote #172 (Never thought I'd be telling Malcolm and Ilya the same thing... :-)
Permalink to quote #169
Related quotes
Portability is for people who cannot write new programs.
Linus TorvaldsLinus Torvalds quote #16 Besides, including <std_ice_cubes.h> is a fatal error on machines that don't have it yet. Bad language design, there... :-)
Larry WallLarry Wall quote #29 The way I see it, if you declare something portable, you'll always be wrong, and if you declare it non-portable, you'll always be right. :-)
Larry WallLarry Wall quote #198