[TerryP]

Oh trust me, I couldn't write in that style of English if a love life depended on it <_<


It comes from an oldy called the ten commands of C programmers.



Basically what it means is if you assume all the world is using what you use, say for example -- you only use a 32-Bit Intel Pentium II with , so you write code that depends on that for something very intimate to that processor and it's hardware but does something really neat.


Then oh crap, you get a shiny new PC running a 128-Bit, 8 core, perfluorocarbon cooled AMD CPU screamin' for new programs.


You Foxtrot Uniform Charle Kilo'ed yourself and anyone else who wants to run your program without a lot of work.


Or what if your using a machine with an 8-Bit byte and a 8 byte word and then machines with 18-bit bytes and 8 byte words become all the rage? It's not likely for the size of a byte to actually change but it is arch dependent if I ever paid any attention.



The "All the world's a VAX" probably dates back to the days of the VAX machines and traditional C: to day I think a better choice of words would be "All the words a x86 (32-bit)" or "all the worlds a Pentium"


I don't think I've ever seen anything *really* stupid other then assumptions about the sizes of various types (or just disregard for possible differences) but ya never know these days !!!