Ansi C is portable to different platforms without problems if you avoid the things that are specified as implementation defined as well.

That, after all, is the point of having a standard.

The problem with unportable C code isn't because every coder is following the standard. The problem is coders targetting their compiler, and (ab)using its extensions. And then of course, there are the different libraries.

Sure, there are some differences from one version to another, but if you restrict yourself to what is documented in the 2nd edition Camel (and avoid the aforementioned inherently-unportable things, such as backticks and link, and hardcoded filenames and paths), it will pretty much run unmodified and with the same semantics on any version from 5.003 forward, on any operating system that has Perl5.

I've yet to write a C program that broke because I upgraded my compiler, or that I had to modify because it needed to be compiled on an older version of the compiler (although I've had to rewrite large portions of C programs because of kernel upgrades). OTOH, every upgrade of perl has broken some program of mine, somewhere.

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