Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!uflorida!haven!adm!smoke!gwyn
From: gwyn@smoke.BRL.MIL (Doug Gwyn)
Newsgroups: comp.std.c
Subject: Re: Inappropriate topics. (?)
Message-ID: <10785@smoke.BRL.MIL>
Date: 19 Aug 89 05:42:00 GMT
References: <148@trigon.UUCP> <207600029@s.cs.uiuc.edu> <941@lakesys.UUCP> <28442@watmath.waterloo.edu> <5780@ficc.uu.net>
Reply-To: gwyn@brl.arpa (Doug Gwyn)
Organization: Ballistic Research Lab (BRL), APG, MD.
Lines: 16

In article <5780@ficc.uu.net> peter@ficc.uu.net (Peter da Silva) writes:
>POSIX is not intended to fill in he gaps in the C standard.

No, but that's not the point.  Recall that most C implementations have
provided open(), read(), etc. in their libraries even though they run
on operating systems quite unlike UNIX.  The UNIX C library served as
a de facto standard for such facilities.  Now that there is an official
standard for UNIX-like systems, it should be expected to replace UNIX
in this role.  The main advantage of POSIX over UNIX for this is that
it provides exactly one way to do such things as disabling echo mode,
whereas the existence of several different UNIX versions made it harder
to use UNIX for a model for such operations.

Nobody is seriously suggesting that all of POSIX has to be implemented
in a non-UNIX environment for it to provide a good guide for just those
facilities that CAN be readily emulated.