The Practice of Programming

Chapter 8: Portability

Finally, standardization, like convention, can be another manifestation of the strong order. But unlike convention it has been accepted in Modern architecture as an enriching product of our technology, yet dreaded for its potential domination and brutality.

Robert Venturi, Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture

It’s hard to write software that runs correctly and efficiently. So once a program works in one environment, you don’t want to repeat much of the effort if you move it to a different compiler or processor or operating system. Ideally, it should need no changes whatsoever.

This ideal is called portability. In practice, “portability” more often stands for the weaker concept that it will be easier to modify the ...