Relay-Version: version B 2.10 5/3/83; site utzoo.UUCP Path: utzoo!mnetor!uunet!seismo!mimsy!oddjob!gargoyle!ihnp4!inuxc!iuvax!bsu-cs!dhesi From: dhesi@bsu-cs.UUCP (Rahul Dhesi) Newsgroups: comp.lang.c,comp.unix.wizards Subject: Re: pointer alignment when int != char * Message-ID: <1086@bsu-cs.UUCP> Date: Thu, 3-Sep-87 13:15:59 EDT Article-I.D.: bsu-cs.1086 Posted: Thu Sep 3 13:15:59 1987 Date-Received: Sat, 5-Sep-87 12:12:23 EDT References: <493@its63b.ed.ac.uk> <6061@brl-smoke.ARPA> <3812@spool.WISC.EDU> <26910@sun.uucp> <625@sugar.UUCP> Reply-To: dhesi@bsu-cs.UUCP (Rahul Dhesi) Organization: CS Dept, Ball St U, Muncie, Indiana Lines: 19 Xref: mnetor comp.lang.c:4138 comp.unix.wizards:4062 In article <625@sugar.UUCP> peter@sugar.UUCP (Peter da Silva) writes: >Are you saying that the ANSI 'C' library includes all the UNIX date/time >functions, but doesn't include lseek? One distinguishing difference between operating systems designed with interactive use in mind (e.g. AmigaDOS, MS-DOS, UNIX) and operating systems that trace their ancestry to the days of punched cards (e.g. VAX/VMS, most IBM mainframe operating systems, and perhaps Primos) is the inability of the latter to do an arbitrary lseek. I speculate that the punched-card paradigm was most effectively implemented on disk by storing the card image as [ ] thus allowing cards of any length (not just 80 characters) to be stored, and easily skipped in a sequential read without having to read each character. Counterexamples probably exist. -- Rahul Dhesi UUCP: {ihnp4,seismo}!{iuvax,pur-ee}!bsu-cs!dhesi