Today I spent 4 hours on fixing the code since I moved from Redhat Linux 7.0 running perl 5.6.0 to Debian Woody running 5.6.1. And why does untie [perldoc.com]ing a tie [perldoc.com]d hash in a DESTROY method cause a core dump in 5.6.1 on Linux but not on 5.6.0 on the Redhat system or 5.6.x and 5.8.0 on Win32?
The same goes for LaTeXīs device independant files. Why is there a difference depending on the printer I use?
Andreas
That the same version of perl might crash on Debian but not on Rethat is probably due to differences in configuration or dependencies, such as different versions of libc.
Comparisons between perl on linux and on windows is even more hazardous, since the underlying systems are very different.
As for LaTeX and DVI files, the DVI files *are* device independent. Latex generates the same file on any system. The point of having DVI output is that you format your file once, and linebreaks, hyphenations, pagebreaks etc are done. All the differences you see on print are due to hardware or driver differences. You can format a document on one system and mail to file to somebody else on an entirely different system, and the formatting will be the same, provided both parties have the same fonts.
The translation of a DVI file to a specific device is obviously not device independent, so if you print a DVI file on two different devices, you might not get exactly the same output. Variations can be due to different capabilities of the devices or to faulty output drivers. There is no way Latex can do anything about that.
René.
Andreas
