Re: nullptr == p_one_past_last
Frederick Gotham wrote:
Greg Herlihy posted:
A C++ program may not be very portable, but C++ the language
is.
Ridiculous! It's quite easy to keep one's code, and thus one's
program, portable.
It depends on what you are doing. What is quite easy is keeping
the non-portable parts in small, isolated modules so you can
port them as needed, without modifying the rest.
And given the computing landscape of the 70s in which C grew
up - this calculation makes perfect sense: the prospect of
running one program on even more than a single machine (much
less, two different kinds of machines) no doubt seemed to
have far less practical value than the prospect of using a
single computer language to write programs on different
types of computers.
All my code is fully portable. All of it.
So you've never written anything but a toy program. Never used
a GUI, never written anything threaded, never used a socket.
Never been concerned by performance, and had to profile a
program. Never done anything with a filename but copy it.
Never needed options from the command line.
I've done all of these at one time or another, and I don't think
I've ever written anything but the simplest programs which
didn't do at least one of them, generally many of the them.
So the word "portable" when describing C++ really refers to
the language's portability - and not to the portability of
its source code. Consequently, if the ability to program in
C++ across a diverse set of computing hardware is one's
definition of "portable" than, yes, C++ is portable. If on
the other hand, the portability of a computer language is
measured in terms of how easily and reliabily a single
program can made to run on a diverse set of computer
hardware, then "portable C++ code" would be an oxymoron.
No, not all. I am aware of the restrictions and freedoms which
an implementation of C++ may have. With this knowledge, I can
write fully- portable, Standard-compliant code.
How do you start a thread? How do you synchronize a write to
disk? How do you listen on a socket? How do you parse
filenames, to handle a directory tree?
My current application needs all of these. Which means that it
cannot be written in 100% portable C++.
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