There’s a line of thought amongst programmers who do not understand what portability means that simply wrapping up any system service in a MACRO is enough. printf() becomes PRINTF(), sleep() becomes SLEEP(), etc, etc, ad nauseam. The fallacy here, of course, is that they assume that the name might change, but the interface won’t, which is dead wrong. Name changes are the least of your worries. It’s interface changes that you should be concerned about, and your “portability layer” must present a common, unified interface, not just “the interface of whichever platform this code ran on first”. Furrfu!
July 15, 2003
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