Python and Industry, IBM I'm afraid

[Alex Martelli]

"Donn Cave" <donn at u.washington.edu> wrote in message
news:947ddt$g8a$1 at nntp6.u.washington.edu...
> Quoth "Alex Martelli" <aleaxit at yahoo.com>:
> [re AIX ]
> |    As I recall, its main
> | "here's our horrible surprise of the day for you" feature
> | was a malloc that would never return 0 even if you asked
> | it for FAR more memory than you had around -- rather, the
> | program died horribly later when it actually tried to USE
> | the memory it THOUGHT it had allocated...
>
> Never ran into this, thanks maybe to more modest memory requirements.
> But AIX's malloc is somewhat notorious for the converse:  request
> 0 bytes and get a null pointer.  I guess the rationale for this is
> something like "ask a silly question, get a silly answer", and it
> still does that to this day.

But *THIS* is compliant with the ISO C standard.  I have no
problem with that -- our code routinely ported between a dozen
platforms at the time.


> When things are not going well on an AIX port, another thing to think
> about is a compiler flag, I believe it's -qchars=signed, that reverses
> their unusual unsigned char default.

Again, not the kind of porting problem you run into when you already
work on a dozen disparate platforms...:-).


Alex