"C" on Atari looks pretty wierd

[John Gilmore]

I have been saving most of the sources that float through the Atari and
Amiga newsgroups on the off chance that some of them might be portable
to other environments (e.g. GNU or Unix).  Things seem to be getting
worse rather than better as time goes on though.  I am now seeing things
that don't even look like C, e.g. this fragment from the recently posted
"Backup" program:

dirlen = strlen(dir) + 1;       /* Save length of pathname to this point */
strcat(dir, "\\*.*");   /* Start with 1st file          */
//cpynchar(alert6 + 4L, dir, 20);
//form_alert(1,alert6);

What are these job control cards doing in the middle of a C program?
Do Atari C compilers really accept these?  What do they do?

Also, the library routines used are almost totally bonkers.  E.g.
to open a file they use Fopen rather than fopen.  To read it's Fread.
To scan a directory it's Fsfirst and Fsnext rather than opendir and
readdir.  For malloc/free they even use Malloc/Mfree!  What was wrong
with the old names, did they make software too easy to port?

While I have my disagreements with the draft ANSI standard for C,
it would sure be better than this kind of wild change-for-change's-sake.
-- 
John Gilmore  {sun,ptsfa,lll-crg,ihnp4}!hoptoad!gnu   jgilmore at lll-crg.arpa
Call +1 800 854 7179 or +1 714 540 9870 and order X3.159-198x (ANSI C) for $65.
Then spend two weeks reading it and weeping.  THEN send in formal comments!