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From: henry@utzoo.UUCP (Henry Spencer)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.c,comp.unix.wizards
Subject: Re: pointer alignment when int != char *
Message-ID: <8560@utzoo.UUCP>
Date: Wed, 9-Sep-87 14:54:34 EDT
Article-I.D.: utzoo.8560
Posted: Wed Sep  9 14:54:34 1987
Date-Received: Wed, 9-Sep-87 14:54:34 EDT
References: <493@its63b.ed.ac.uk> <6061@brl-smoke.ARPA>
Organization: U of Toronto Zoology
Lines: 20

>    So in other words, Mr. Gwyn, what you are saying is that the ANSI C
> workgroup has taken it upon themselves to decide that "portable applications"
> programs have NO NEED to do other than straight sequential I/O on files,
> is this correct? ...

Nonsense.  Stdio includes fread, fwrite, and fseek.  The X3J11 drafts do
put some restrictions on portable uses of them, which are inevitable given
that the full generality of something like Unix seeks is unimplementable
on some systems.  The question is not whether portable applications have
real needs to do strange things, but whether these strange things can be
done in a *portable* way that will work on *most* machines.  Often they can,
*if* one is willing to work at the level of stdio and observe some extra
restrictions.  It is neither appropriate nor practical for X3J11 to wave
a magic wand and declare that any system which can't implement full Unix
semantics is broken.  There really are things which simply CANNOT BE DONE
in a portable way, and people writing portable programs or designing tools
for writing portable programs must acknowledge this.
-- 
"There's a lot more to do in space   |  Henry Spencer @ U of Toronto Zoology
than sending people to Mars." --Bova | {allegra,ihnp4,decvax,utai}!utzoo!henry