Goals of X3J11 (was Re: directory handling in ansi C)

[Ian Dall]

In article <11682 at smoke.BRL.MIL> gwyn at brl.arpa (Doug Gwyn) writes:
>
>X3J11 was generally of the sentiment that there was a de facto fuzzy
>standard for string operations, I/O, etc. and that any really useful
>C standard would have to include these facilities (at least for the
>"hosted" environment; "freestanding" excludes almost all of them).
>I agree with the decision; from my point of view standardizing the
>library facilities was MORE important than standardizing the raw
>language.

This sounds reasonable. There is a difference between functions which
can be defined entirely internally to the language and functions which
define operations on the outside world. "memset", "strcpy" etc are in the
former class and I see no reason they should not be in a language spec.
"fork" is in the latter set and so are directory operations. That is not
to say that standard semantics for directory operations are not useful,
but the proper place is an operating system standard (POSIX) not the
C language standard.


On this rationale one could argue that stdio does not belong in the C
standard since the stream of bytes model of a file is not universal,
but I suppose leaving it out would make the writing of a portable
program impossible.

Disclaimer: I don't have access to the standard and my examples of what
is or is not in the standard library are based on heresay.



-- 
 Ian Dall           life (n). A sexually transmitted disease which afflicts
                              some people more severely than others.
idall at augean.oz