Common programming language ambiguity
Paul D. Gootherts, James W. Davis · ACM SIGPLAN Notices · 1982
When most people think of portable programs they think of programs that can be compiled by different compilers (with few, if any, changes required in the source code). It is an unwritten assumption that all of these compilers accept (to a reasonable degree) the same language.In this paper we shall demonstrate that this commonly required similarity can be relaxed considerably under certain circumstances. This is accomplished by introducing an unusual new technique for writing portable programs.