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From: bruner@sp15.csrd.uiuc.edu (John Bruner)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.mac.programmer
Subject: Re: stdio, THINK C and APPLs
Message-ID: <BRUNER.91Jan8120222@sp15.csrd.uiuc.edu>
Date: 8 Jan 91 18:02:22 GMT
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In-Reply-To: dorner@pequod.cso.uiuc.edu's message of Tue, 8 Jan 1991 16:04:31 GMT

Perhaps this has changed in the final version, but section 4.9.5.3 of
the 7 December 1988 draft of the ANSI C standard says:

	Synopsis

		#include <stdio.h>
		FILE *fopen(const char *filename, const char *mode);

	Description

		The fopen function opens the file whose name is the
	string pointed to by filename and associates a string with it.

		The argument mode points to a string beginning with one
	of the following sequences: (footnote 112)

	...

Footnote 112 says "Additional characters may follow these sequences."

In the Rationale (also section 4.9.5.3) it says

		... An implementation may choose to allow additional
	file specifications as part of the mode string argument.
	For instance,

		file1 = fopen(file1name, "wb,reclen=80");

	might be a reasonable way, on a system which provides
	record-oriented binary files, for an implementation to allow
	a programmer to specify record length.

This brings the conclusion that an implementation that allows the
resource fork to be fopen'ed by using some extra characters in the
mode string would be ANSI-compliant.

A program that uses such a feature will be portable only if the
different C language implementations for the Mac all provide this
extension in a mutually-compatible fashion.

A program that manipulates the resource fork is not going to be
portable to non-Mac platforms, regardless of whether or not it uses
extensions to fopen().
--
John Bruner	Center for Supercomputing R&D, University of Illinois
	bruner@csrd.uiuc.edu		(217) 244-4476	
--
John Bruner	Center for Supercomputing R&D, University of Illinois
	bruner@csrd.uiuc.edu		(217) 244-4476