Is this a true statement?

[David C. Ullrich]

On 23 Jun 2001 15:34:56 GMT, carlf at panix.com (Carl Fink) wrote:

>In article <mailman.993306635.11457.python-list at python.org>, Chris
>Gonnerman wrote:
> 
>> Writing TO a device driver is easy enough... the previous poster
>> was talking about writing the DRIVER in Python.  No OS I'm aware
>> of takes device drivers in any languages other than assembler, C,
>> and/or C++.
>
>He's making a very finicky, nitpicking, and frankly silly point:  the
>device driver is a sequence of bytes.  You can write that sequence of
>bytes *directly as machine code* from Python, in the sense that you
>can have a Python program that would create a valid device driver
>file by opening it, writing those bytes to it, and closing it.

As opposed to a program written in C that writes a device driver:
It opens a file, writes bytes to it, and closes the file.

(Doesn't it??? What _else_ does it do?????)

>Essentially he's deliberately misunderstanding what "write" means,
>using the "write to a file" meaning instead of "create a new program"
>meaning.

I may well be misunderstanding something, but it's not deliberate.
What _is_ the distinction between "write to a file" and
"create a new program"? (I'm assuming that the "program"
in question is the device driver. _Is_ that something other
than a file? And if not then what does a C program that
writes device drivers do, other than write a file?)

>-- 
>Carl Fink		carlf at dm.net



David C. Ullrich
*********************
"Sometimes you can have access violations all the 
time and the program still works." (Michael Caracena, 
comp.lang.pascal.delphi.misc 5/1/01)