Python and Industry, IBM I'm afraid

[Donn Cave]

Quoth "Alex Martelli" <aleaxit at yahoo.com>:
[re AIX ]
|    As I recall, its main
| "here's our horrible surprise of the day for you" feature
| was a malloc that would never return 0 even if you asked
| it for FAR more memory than you had around -- rather, the
| program died horribly later when it actually tried to USE
| the memory it THOUGHT it had allocated...

Never ran into this, thanks maybe to more modest memory requirements.
But AIX's malloc is somewhat notorious for the converse:  request
0 bytes and get a null pointer.  I guess the rationale for this is
something like "ask a silly question, get a silly answer", and it
still does that to this day.

When things are not going well on an AIX port, another thing to think
about is a compiler flag, I believe it's -qchars=signed, that reverses
their unusual unsigned char default.

	Donn Cave, donn at u.washington.edu