Free-standing vs. hosted implementations

[Henry Spencer]

In article <672 at sol.warwick.ac.uk> cudat at warwick.ac.uk (J M Hicks) writes:
>Some items in this news group or comp.lang.c have
>alluded to a distinction made in the draft
>ANSI standard for C between "free-standing" and "hosted" implementations of C.
>
>What does this mean? ...

"Hosted" means the sort of environment that people are used to in Unix, with
a library, a file system, etc etc.  "Free-standing" means the sort of thing
which arises when you are writing code to be put into ROM in, say, a micro-
controlled toaster:  no libraries except what you bring with you, no files,
non-standard program startup methods, etc.  The distinction comes up because
X3J11 wants to mandate the availability of things like stdio in hosted
implementations without making it impossible to use ANSI C for programming
a toaster.
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MSDOS is not dead, it just     |     Henry Spencer at U of Toronto Zoology
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