Re: Pentium Pro and Pentium II bug

Robert S. Thau (rst@ai.mit.edu)
Mon, 12 May 1997 18:18:04 -0400 (EDT)


> There is something to be said for using >= 2 systems though. It
> forces a serious portability (too much beer... can't think of the
> word...) DISCIPLINE on you. Otherwise it is way too easy to fall into
> vendor specific -isms. If you're distributing stuff in pure Java this
> may not be mucho important but if you have bits of C or shell scripts
> it is, as I'm sure you know.

Even for certain categories of Java code, it's a useful discipline.
"Write once, run anywhere" is certainly possible to do quite nicely
--- IBM's Java chess-watcher applet was very nicely done, aside from
the teensy-weensy text window (which was at least equally lousy on all
platforms) --- but when serious windowing is involved, in the current
state of the AWT, it can become at least a little awkward.

There are also subtle gotchas involving thread behavior on some
platforms.

rst