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From: guy%gorodish@Sun.COM (Guy Harris)
Newsgroups: comp.unix.questions
Subject: Re: Fork and Join, Pipe in C
Message-ID: <22357@sun.uucp>
Date: Mon, 29-Jun-87 18:01:22 EDT
Article-I.D.: sun.22357
Posted: Mon Jun 29 18:01:22 1987
Date-Received: Wed, 1-Jul-87 02:38:29 EDT
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> 	We were talking about the *creation* of the system call.  

Which is totally irrelevant.  I see no evidence that they did not intend other
code to use "vfork"; "csh" just happened to contain the code that
suggested its creation.

> 	And the funny thing is that the very first program to use vfork
>	(csh) needed to be able to pook about in the parent's address space.

Some people have a very funny notion of the meaning of the word
"need".  I have seen no evidence that "hashstat" *required* that
"vfork" be abused, merely that it happened to be convenient to do so.
A heck of a lot of crocks are created in the name of convenience.

There are entirely too many programmers out there who are quick to
take advantage of characteristics of the way some function is
implemented without considering whether this is really a good idea.
It should be made clear that this is a Bad Idea, and justifiable ONLY
if it is the lesser of two or more evils.

Unfortunately, there seems to be a large segment of the UNIX
community that sees little or nothing wrong with this.  This causes
enough problems with non-portable OSes (I'm sure there are stories
about programs "broken" by changes to VMS, where the fault lies
*entirely* with the authors of those programs, not with DEC, as the
authors in question were relying on the system continuing to work the
way they "knew" it worked), but can cause even more problems with
UNIX, as there will be several different implementations of the
*same* interface.
	Guy Harris
	{ihnp4, decvax, seismo, decwrl, ...}!sun!guy
	guy@sun.com