larson@snmp.sri.com (Alan Larson) (04/24/91)
Recently I have tried converting a program to use Think C version
4. I have discovered an interesting set of problems:
1. Some routines from the old stdio package are gone, such
as kbhit(), apparently leaving no way to determine if
a key has been hit.
As it is desirable to be able interrupt a running program,
this is annoying. Button() doesn't work very well when
the program is doing a lot of output to the screen.
2. The external variable _echo is gone.
3. The strncmp routine now wants a long (actually size_t)
as its third argument. This makes it especially difficult
to write programs that will port easily to and from unix
systems, where that variable is still an int. This would
be less of a problem if the compiler did the type conversion,
but it doesn't.
I know the concepts of standards is good, but why did you have to
break unix-compatable programs, and not offer a compatable library?
Alan