Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!purdue!gatech!bloom-beacon!eru!luth!sunic!mcsun!hp4nl!botter!star.cs.vu.nl!ast
From: ast@cs.vu.nl (Andy Tanenbaum)
Newsgroups: comp.os.minix
Subject: Re: stdio
Message-ID: <3196@ast.cs.vu.nl>
Date: 9 Sep 89 20:48:03 GMT
References: <18952@princeton.Princeton.EDU> <1521@bruce.OZ> <18971@princeton.Princeton.EDU>
Reply-To: ast@cs.vu.nl (Andy Tanenbaum)
Organization: VU Informatica, Amsterdam
Lines: 28

In article <18971@princeton.Princeton.EDU> nfs@notecnirp.UUCP (Norbert Schlenker) writes:
>In article <1521@bruce.OZ> cechew@bruce.OZ (Earl Chew) writes:
>From ast's summary posting, it looks like 1.4b is a bunch of patches at
>the command level, just like 1.4a, so I suspect the answer is NO.

You are correct. 1.4b will be the second release of Bruce Evan's kernel
plus a lot of stuff I have been accumulating in commands, lib etc.  It will
not start on POSIX.  It won't include either of the new stdio packages
because I would like to wait for Norbert's and then see what the majority
opinion of them is.  Starting in a couple of weeks I will begin the change
to POSIX, starting with the headers.  Is the ANSI C standard actually
published yet?  I have an old draft of it, but I don't know the status.
I do have the final, published POSIX standard, however.

On a related note, we have converte the ACK compiler to be ANSI standard
and it is too big to fit in 64K + 64K.  Such is life.  Thus V2.0 will
continue with the K&R compiler, however with floating point and a separate
assembler and linker, as well as bug fixes.  While this is s pity, it is
not so awful.  I think K&R C will continue to exist for many years, given
the large volume of code in it.  Does anyone have a list of features that
are legal in K&R C and forbidden or discouraged in ANSI C?  If so, please
post them, and I will try to free the code of them.  If I can manage to
write MINIX in the subset of C that is common to K&R and ANSI, then the
code will compile with the K&R compiler and be legal ANSI as well.

Earl: Please send me your bang path.

Andy Tanenbaum (ast@cs.vu.nl)