Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!rutgers!tut.cis.ohio-state.edu!brutus.cs.uiuc.edu!wuarchive!texbell!sugar!ficc!peter
From: peter@ficc.uu.net (Peter da Silva)
Newsgroups: comp.std.c
Subject: Re: ReadKey like Function in C
Message-ID: <5672@ficc.uu.net>
Date: 14 Aug 89 13:07:12 GMT
References: <148@trigon.UUCP> <207600029@s.cs.uiuc.edu> <941@lakesys.UUCP> <2357@auspex.auspex.com>
Organization: Xenix Support, FICC
Lines: 23

In article <2357@auspex.auspex.com>, guy@auspex.auspex.com (Guy Harris) writes:
> possible to do so atop, say, MS-DOS, but in that case it might be better
> to consider either a *de jure* or *de facto* standard "subset" of POSIX
> that may include some of the "termio" functions but not include "fork"
> than to burden the C standard with functions that might be difficult or
> impossible to implement on, say, the older mainframe OSes mentioned above.

Hmmm. Does POSIX specify that fork() is the process-creation mechanism? I
hope not... while the fork()-exec() pair is singularly elegant, it's not
implementable (without a massive number of kludges) in a wide variety of
operating systems: OS/9, VMS, RSX, AmigaOS, and in fact any O/S I can think
of off the top of my head other than UNIX.

While I'm here, what's the sentiment among C standards folks for some sort
of standard co-routine arrangement? It would not require any changes to
the language, just a few library routines: cocreate(), cocall(), codelete().
It should work on any machine without a strict stack segment (and C on such
a beast is going to have problems anyway).
-- 
Peter da Silva, Xenix Support, Ferranti International Controls Corporation.
Business: peter@ficc.uu.net, +1 713 274 5180. | "The sentence I am now
Personal: peter@sugar.hackercorp.com.   `-_-' |  writing is the sentence
Quote: Have you hugged your wolf today?  'U`  |  you are now reading"