Path: utzoo!attcan!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!rutgers!tut.cis.ohio-state.edu!gem.mps.ohio-state.edu!ginosko!uunet!mcsun!unido!tub!uwbln!ckl From: ckl@uwbln.UUCP (Christoph Kuenkel) Newsgroups: comp.lang.c Subject: Re: Healthy skepticism towards documentation (was: effect of free) Message-ID: <1813@uwbull.uwbln.UUCP> Date: 11 Sep 89 12:37:30 GMT References: <10817@riks.csl.sony.co.jp> <10990@smoke.BRL.MIL> <14176@bloom-beacon.MIT.EDU> Distribution: comp Organization: UniWare GmbH, Berlin Lines: 22 In article <14176@bloom-beacon.MIT.EDU>, scs@hstbme.mit.edu (Steve Summit) writes: > Of course, the next question is, if you can't trust the > documentation, what can you trust? (It used to be the source > code, but fewer people have access to it in these days of [...]) i do it the following way: 1. see my local man page. feature not available (fna) -> forget it (fi) 2. see SVID. fna ? fi 3. see x/open guide. fna ? fi 4. see pure bsd4.2 manual. fna ? fi 5. see sunOS manual. fna ? fi 6. remember, what was in v6. fna ? do i really need it ? fi 7. now i try to find a common subset of 1 to 6 (by stripping the result type of sprintf() for example). empty ? fi at this point, almost all of whats left can be found in the v6 manual pages or can be implemented in an optional compatibility lib. and i'm porting to *ix only! -- # include Christoph Kuenkel/UniWare GmbH Kantstr. 152, 1000 Berlin 12, West Germany ck@tub.BITNET ckl@uwbln {unido,tmpmbx,tub}!uwbln!ckl