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From: edw@ius1.cs.cmu.edu (Eddie Wyatt)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.c
Subject: Re: why "gmtime" but not "read" and "write"?
Message-ID: <1043@ius1.cs.cmu.edu>
Date: Tue, 22-Sep-87 09:31:28 EDT
Article-I.D.: ius1.1043
Posted: Tue Sep 22 09:31:28 1987
Date-Received: Thu, 24-Sep-87 05:57:27 EDT
References: <706@sugar.UUCP>
Organization: Carnegie-Mellon University, CS/RI
Lines: 24

In article <706@sugar.UUCP>, peter@sugar.UUCP (Peter da Silva) writes:
> Y'all are missing the point. Why include "gmtime" and "localtime" in Ansi-C
> (other than to keep the well known false sense of well-being when trying to
> port UNIX programs to non-UNIX systems), but leave read/write/etc out? It

  I would suspect that there exists some OSs (maybe many) that could not
support all of the semantics of read and write.  Also to port read, write
and any other of the hosts of functions that operate on file descriptors,
one would have to port the concept of a FILE DESCRIPTOR into the
language.  Last point, hasn't ANSI accepted fread and fwrite as
part of the Standard C library.  So if portable code is an issue,
shouldn't you be using them instead of read and write?

> just doesn't seem consistent to me. Since most non-UNIX-based 'C' compilers
> in the real world implement read and write and *not* gmtime and localtime,

  No real C Compiler implements read and write - its part of the C library
which I consister not part of the language.

-- 

					Eddie Wyatt

e-mail: edw@ius1.cs.%%%%%%%%