Some questions about POSIX headers

[Moderator, John S. Quarterman]

From: Andy Tanenbaum <uunet!cs.vu.nl!ast>

In article <434 at longway.TIC.COM> karish at forel.stanford.edu (Chuck Karish) writes:
>If the
>reader needs to have special knowledge or to note every subtle nuance
>of meaning in order to understand a standard, the standard is
>inadequate.

I second this 1000%.  There was a comment earlier in this group to the
effect "Everybody in the committee knows what it means."  That is exactly
the point.  A standard should be written so that an outsider who was not
on the committee but who is skilled in the field can pick it up and
understand it.    Now by-and-large, P1003.1 isn't so bad, but I am holding
my breath about the ISO version.  Last year I went through the ISO OSI
standards very carefully.  In many cases after 3 or 4 detailed readings I
didn't have the slightest idea of what they were talking about (e.g. the
OSI session standard has an endless amount of mumbo jumbo about how to 
start and end an activity, but nary a word on what an activity might be).
I eventually figured out how to determine what the standard is all about--
you call up the convenor on the phone and ask him.

As an outsider who is trying to implement P1003.1 (and who has not even
looked at the UNIX source code), I am an interesting case in point.
No doubt I'll have some questions in the course of time.  

Andy Tanenbaum (ast at cs.vu.nl)

Volume-Number: Volume 17, Number 63