farren@hoptoad.uucp (Mike Farren) (06/30/87)
I have had a query from a friend who is a novice at C, and don't have the
knowledge to answer him, knowing little about the proposed ANSI
standard. He says that in persuing H&S's discussion of the ANSI
standard, the low-level I/O functions (such as open(), read(), etc.)
do not seem to exist. I have told him that to the best of my
knowledge, this does not mean that they are going to disappear, simply
that they weren't mentioned in the standard. Am I correct? What's
the real story? Please reply by e-mail, as I get the feeling this is
a pretty dumb question...
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"... if the church put in half the time on covetousness
Mike Farren that it does on lust, this would be a better world ..."
hoptoad!farren Garrison Keillor, "Lake Wobegon Days"gwyn@brl-smoke.ARPA (Doug Gwyn ) (07/04/87)
In article <2343@hoptoad.uucp> farren@hoptoad.UUCP (Mike Farren) writes: >... He says that in persuing H&S's discussion of the ANSI >standard, the low-level I/O functions (such as open(), read(), etc.) >do not seem to exist. I'm posting the response rather than mailing it, because this is an issue worth understanding. The (proposed) ANS for C (X3.159) limits itself to the "raw" language and to that portion of the hosted run-time environment (library routines etc.) that are believed to be usefully implementable on as wide a range of host architectures and operating systems as possible. The UNIX functions open(), read(), etc. can be adequately implemented on some systems but not on others. Consequently the C standard will define the STDIO interface in a way believed to be universally implementable, rather than a UNIX-like set of primitive I/O functions. The latter, however, are being standardized by IEEE 1003.1 (POSIX), which has its scope specifically limited to UNIX-like systems. ANS X3.159-198x should be implementable on any POSIX-supporting system, but not the converse.