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From: mark@cbosgd.UUCP
Newsgroups: net.lang
Subject: Re: I/O operations in programming languages
Message-ID: <262@cbosgd.UUCP>
Date: Wed, 31-Aug-83 10:45:22 EDT
Article-I.D.: cbosgd.262
Posted: Wed Aug 31 10:45:22 1983
Date-Received: Thu, 1-Sep-83 05:29:47 EDT
References: <666@mit-eddie.UUCP>, <110@csd1.UUCP>
Organization: Bell Labs, Columbus
Lines: 30

In reply to Michael Condict's "proofs" that C has I/O:

I challenge you to find any reference to printf or any other I/O
operation in the C Reference Manual.  (That's the appendix to the
C book, for example.)  The C language simply does not have I/O
as a defined part of the language.

There is something called the "standard I/O library" which nearly
every implementation of C has.  This includes fopen, <stdio.h>,
printf, and a couple dozen other routines.  There are implementations
of C that don't include this (Idris comes to mind, as well as V6,
which had a different "portable C library" that flopped), but the
current de facto standard is that you get a C compiler AND stdio.
(In fact, most implementations go one step further and provide
something called "the C library" which was originally supposed to
be UNIX specific.  This includes string operations, routines like
open, read, write, and lseek that deal with small integer file
descriptors, and command line parsing implementing the UNIX argc/argv
notion and < and > redirection.)

This does not make them part of the language.  It just means that in
order to use C, you need both a compiler AND a library.  This is in
contrast to FORTRAN, where I/O and a set of built in functions are
defined in the manual to be part of the language.

Claiming that if you don't have I/O in the language you have a language
of only theoretical interest is silly.  It assumes you can't put
tools together.  Kind of like saying that since Goodyear makes tires,
if Goodyear doesn't make things to put the tires on (e.g. cars) then
Goodyear products are of only theoretical interest.