Path: utzoo!utgpu!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!cs.utexas.edu!uunet!cme!swe.ncsl.nist.gov!bagwill From: bagwill@swe.ncsl.nist.gov (Bob Bagwill) Newsgroups: comp.unix.wizards Subject: Re: POSIX bashing Keywords: termios POSIX Message-ID: <1048@durer.cme.nist.gov> Date: 2 Apr 91 19:59:13 GMT References: <3446@unisoft.UUCP> <15621@smoke.brl.mil> <15645@smoke.brl.mil> <670533623.5140@mindcraft.com> Sender: news@cme.nist.gov Reply-To: bagwill@swe.ncsl.nist.gov (Bob Bagwill) Followup-To: comp.unix.wizards Organization: NIST Lines: 37 I was... the author of the first version of the termios section of the NIST POSIX Conformance Test Suite and of the first version of the test assertions for that chapter, but I wasn't a member of the POSIX.1 or .3 work groups. Writing test assertions and tests for POSIX or UNIX based merely on POSIX.1 or SVID is no fun. I cheated and read source code to try to understand what was going on. You remember the story about the four blind men and the elephant. Given the descriptions from the blind men, how would you write a field guide to identifying elephants? And given the field guide, could you build an elephant from scratch? (Sorry for the characterization of the POSIX work groups as blind men :-) Firing up another metaphor here... IMHODI (In my humble opinion and deep ignorance) UNIX is like the Bible (I'll leave it to someone more knowlegable to write a humorous version of the history of UNIX recast in biblical terms). It was written by many people in many languages over many years. Each author claimed to be divinely inspired. :-) Each publisher of subsequent revisions had to guess what the original authors REALLY meant. Each contributing editor felt free to rewrite, restate, translate, discard, etc. any pieces that didn't fit, and add their own extensions, explanations, etc. POSIX is just the most recent edition. It's no surprise that it's not backward compatible. It's no surprise that everyone wants to add stuff.