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From: henry@utzoo.UUCP (Henry Spencer)
Newsgroups: net.lang.c
Subject: Re: Non-reentrant code generated by C compiler
Message-ID: <4270@utzoo.UUCP>
Date: Sat, 25-Aug-84 18:45:27 EDT
Article-I.D.: utzoo.4270
Posted: Sat Aug 25 18:45:27 1984
Date-Received: Sat, 25-Aug-84 18:45:27 EDT
References: <510@calgary.UUCP>, <1154@elsie.UUCP>, <4167@brl-tgr.ARPA>, <1182@elsie.UUCP>
Organization: U of Toronto Zoology
Lines: 19

> Actually, with all the muttering in this group of late on how to redo struct-
> valued returns, returning a structure probably IS nonportable--sometimes it
> will be reentrant, sometimes not.

There's nothing unportable about structure returns if your code doesn't
need reentrancy, which is true of 95% of all C programs at least.

> And, of course, return of structures was absent before the advent of Version 7--
> so struct-valued functions are not portable to Version 6 and its clones.

There were a great many other things absent before V7; very few modern
C programs will compile successfully on a V6 C compiler.  For example, both
"long" and "typedef" arrived after V6 (although some "6.5" compilers, like
the Phototypesetter compiler, had them).  Portability to a true V6 compiler
is prohibitively difficult, and probably not worthwhile.  V7 is the de facto
standard against which C compilers have been measured for some time.
-- 
				Henry Spencer @ U of Toronto Zoology
				{allegra,ihnp4,linus,decvax}!utzoo!henry