Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!lll-winken!lll-tis!helios.ee.lbl.gov!nosc!ucsd!ucsdhub!hp-sdd!ncr-sd!ncrlnk!ncrcce!mercer
From: mercer@ncrcce.StPaul.NCR.COM (Dan Mercer)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.c
Subject: Re: Getchar w/wout echo
Summary: Portability across differing hardware architectures?
Message-ID: <733@ncrcce.StPaul.NCR.COM>
Date: 1 Sep 88 21:22:27 GMT
References: <371@marob.MASA.COM> <225800061@uxe.cso.uiuc.edu>
Reply-To: mercer@ncrcce.StPaul.NCR.COM (Dan Mercer)
Organization: NCR Comten, Inc.
Lines: 35

In article <225800061@uxe.cso.uiuc.edu> mcdonald@uxe.cso.uiuc.edu writes:
:
:>	Before you go mucking with the language,  I suggest you learn
:>	a bit more about your hardware,  your operating system,  and
:>	how they interrelate.  Then I suggest you do what I did when I
:>	wrote a menuing system - read everything available about the
:>	tty device drivers,  stty,  and termio,  experiment like
:>	crazy,  then write your own raw character input routines.
:
:We want it put in the language so that programs will run portably,
:and MOST IMPORTANTLY, so that operating system designers will
:have to fix their operating systems so that it can be done 
:portably!!!!!!!!!!
:
:Doug McDonald

	I think you misunderstand portability.  'C' is portable because
	its not machine dependent.  The run time support libraries
	are machine dependent.  Strcpy on some systems is written in
	'C',  but in most cases,  is probably written in assembler
	to maximize machine efficiencies.

	'C' run time support differs from machine to machine,  and
	operating system to operating system.  Forking on UNIX(tm)
	creates another concurrently running process.  No such luck
	on MS-DOS(tm).

	Portability doesn't mean I can write a program for my PC and
	recompile it for my NCR Tower and expect it to run the same.
	Get real.  And don't expect operating system designers to
	redesign their operating systems just because someone's too
	dumb to figure out how to turn off echoing.


	Dan Mercer
	NCR Comten