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.