Relay-Version: version B 2.10 5/3/83; site utzoo.UUCP Posting-Version: version B 2.10.2 9/18/84; site brl-tgr.ARPA Path: utzoo!watmath!clyde!burl!ulysses!allegra!mit-eddie!think!harvard!seismo!brl-tgr!gwyn From: gwyn@brl-tgr.ARPA (Doug Gwyn) Newsgroups: net.lang.c Subject: Re: Re: Re: casts to (void) Message-ID: <703@brl-tgr.ARPA> Date: Thu, 15-Aug-85 03:22:22 EDT Article-I.D.: brl-tgr.703 Posted: Thu Aug 15 03:22:22 1985 Date-Received: Sun, 18-Aug-85 03:13:47 EDT References: <441@brl-tgr.ARPA> <261@kitty.UUCP> <549@brl-tgr.ARPA> <363@baylor.UUCP> Organization: Ballistic Research Lab Lines: 32 > > The reason why not is, you have to limit yourself to a fairly puny > > common subset and implement your own replacements for such useful > > functions as drand48(), hsearch(), tempnam(), getopt(), etc. etc. > > Our native library doesn't have drand48, hsearch or getopt, and tempnam is > just a throwback to the days before sprintf. I SAID that if you stick to a lowest common denominator, you would not be able to use these nifty functions. (Judging by your remark, I don't think you know what tempnam does.) If you really enjoy re-implementing almost everything from scratch, more power to you, but I think it's uneconomical. > > Also, it is hard to use the basic utilities via popen() since they > > don't behave the same in many cases. You also cannot exploit the > > I don't use popen either. It doesn't run on non-UNIX systems. > > > more powerful features of "make", you have a "ranlib" problem, etc. These comments were specifically directed at the problems of developing code for a UNIX-like target system (I had 4.2BSD in mind) if a standard environment is not available. You could even provide substantially the same environment on your MS-DOS system. The Software Tools Users Group has shown the way. I did this once for a RSTS/E system, which is not inherently very much like UNIX, and two or three times for variants of UNIX. Are you aware of the current efforts to generate (international) standards for a portable operating system interface? This should make the application developer's work much easier in the long run.