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From: willcox@urbana.mcd.mot.com (David A Willcox)
Newsgroups: comp.std.unix
Subject: Re: Is there a standard prototype for `execvp'?
Message-ID: <17573@cs.utexas.edu>
Date: 1 Feb 91 15:08:31 GMT
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Submitted-by: willcox@urbana.mcd.mot.com (David A Willcox)

rfg@lupine.uucp (Ron Guilmette) writes:

>It is somewhat dated now, but the only book I have about POSIX is
>copyright 1988.

The new version of POSIX.1, IEEE Std 1003.1-1990, came out last
December.  You can get it from the IEEE; their number is 1-800-678-IEEE,
and I think that the order number is SH13680.  It uses ANSI C prototypes.
execvp(), for example, is:

	int execvp(const char *file, char *const argv[]);

It also has quite a number of other "bug fixes".

>Reading that book, it seems that the POSIX committee didn't want to
>use ANSI C function prototypes for their specification of the C language
>binding because prototypes were too "new-fangled".  Specifically, they
>apparently choose not to express the binding in terms of prototypes because:

ANSI C "wasn't" when the 1988 version of POSIX was written.  There were
drafts of the C standard around, but it wasn't approved, and there was no
guarantee that it wouldn't change.  That was the main reason for staying
with the traditional syntax. 

Volume-Number: Volume 22, Number 97