FreeTDS Development Group

["Mark H. Wood" <mwood AT IUPUI.Edu>]

On Wed, 20 Jun 2001, James K. Lowden wrote:
> Geoff Winkless wrote:
> > A well written middle tier should be reasonably portable. A middle tier 
> > that
> > relies on implementation-specific SQL will (of course) present the same
> > problems.
>
> I don't really have any argument with that, Geoff, just a semantic point.
>
> Your definition of "well written" is "reasonably portable".  That's valid, 
> but it's
> not universal.  Every implementation of anything on any platform in any 
> language
> faces a trade-off between portability and the exploitation of the features 
> of a
> particular environment.  Those features might be ease of development, 
> performance,
> specialized libraries, whatever.

There's another one, too.  Aside from defining "good", you also need to
define "portable".  Some people use the word to mean that you can carry
code from one kind of machine to another and make it run by working it
over lightly, without a total redesign.  Others use it to mean that you
can carry code from one kind of machine to another by copying it to the
new environment and make it run by saying "run".

-- 
Mark H. Wood, Lead System Programmer   mwood AT IUPUI.Edu
Make a good day.