How to ANSIfy

[Chris Torek]

In article <PDS.90Oct15104036 at lemming.webo.dg.com> pds at lemming.webo.dg.com
(Paul D. Smith) writes:
>>>...  *Never* *ever* *change* the standard libraries which
>>>ship with your compiler!

In article <2612 at van-bc.wimsey.bc.ca> jtc at van-bc.wimsey.bc.ca
(J.T. Conklin) follows up with:
>>At UniFax, we ANSIfy the development environment on all of our
>>development machines.  Header files get protoized and missing
>>functions get added to the C library.

In article <1020 at nlsun1.oracle.nl> bengsig at oracle.nl (Bjorn Engsig)
suggests:
>One way to do this, if the vendors headers just miss a few things, is to 
>create your own standard header, make the corrections necessary and #include
>"/usr/include/whatever.h" in this one, and use -I to get your copy included
>instead of the standard one.

We (U of MD CS department) prefer to alter the standard libraries and
header files.  This does require reinstalling changes with new vendor
releases, although recently some of the big vendors have begun to get
their acts together---SunOS and Ultrix release 4 versions (which are
unrelated; they merely have the same major release number) both are
much closer to ANSI conformance.  There are good arguments on both
sides: if you change things in `/usr/include', third-party software may
suddenly manifest latent bugs and/or fail to compile, and said third
parties tend to be unsympathetic when one explains that one is running
a modified system.  On the other hand, if you do not, third-party
software may fail to compile, and they tend to be unsympathetic when
one explains that one is running a non-standard-conforming system. :-)

It helps a great deal to be able to point out that, although our system
is not the same 4.3BSD that everyone else runs, it *is* the same, in
important ways, as the Unix that others *will be* running in the near
future.  So I think the answer changes when one considers `ANSI Standard
improvements' versus `other improvements'.
-- 
In-Real-Life: Chris Torek, Univ of MD Comp Sci Dept (+1 301 405 2750)
Domain:	chris at cs.umd.edu	Path:	uunet!mimsy!chris