Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!husc6!bloom-beacon!tut.cis.ohio-state.edu!mailrus!ames!amdahl!pacbell!att!chinet!les
From: les@chinet.chi.il.us (Leslie Mikesell)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.c
Subject: Re: <string.h> vs <strings.h>
Message-ID: <6801@chinet.chi.il.us>
Date: 17 Oct 88 18:19:19 GMT
References: <456@mrsvr.UUCP> <8649@smoke.ARPA> <14002@mimsy.UUCP> <4354@bsu-cs.UUCP>
Reply-To: les@chinet.chi.il.us (Leslie Mikesell)
Organization: Chinet - Public Access Unix
Lines: 22

In article <4354@bsu-cs.UUCP> dhesi@bsu-cs.UUCP (Rahul Dhesi) writes:
>
>Writing portable code would be less frustrating if we had this
>preprocessor conditional:
>
>#if exists(<strings.h>)
>#include <strings.h>
>#else
>#include <string.h>
>#endif

Likewise for the functions available from the standard library.  I know
ANSI is supposed to help with this but what about all the non-standard
extensions?  Won't you want to use them if possible?  Things like
Larry Wall's Configure script work but require a unix environment to
execute (extracting names from the library, etc.).  Adding a conditional
like:
#if libfunction bcopy
is probably too much to ask, but how about a standard header file that
could be included that would have a #define for each non-standard item?

Les Mikesell