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Portability

Any useful system will eventually be transported from its original development environment to a range of other computing environments.

What kinds of differences between these environments?

  • different operating systems   (different services, system calls)
  • different architectures   (byte ordering, word size, instruction set)
  • different libraries or different versions of libraries
  • different compilers or different versions of same compiler
Different envrionment ⇒ changes required to make program work.