Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!lll-winken!ames!pasteur!ucbvax!ulysses!cjc
From: cjc@ulysses.homer.nj.att.com (Chris Calabrese[mav])
Newsgroups: comp.lang.c
Subject: Re: printf, data presentation
Summary: OS dependancies in C
Message-ID: <11092@ulysses.homer.nj.att.com>
Date: 12 Jan 89 18:02:56 GMT
References: <19@xenlink.UUCP> <225800108@uxe.cso.uiuc.edu>
Organization: AT&T Bell Laboratories, Murray Hill
Lines: 48

In article <225800108@uxe.cso.uiuc.edu>, mcdonald@uxe.cso.uiuc.edu writes:
> Things like NOS are why I WANT it IN THE STANDARD!!! If you only get
> a line at a time YOU CAN'T, ABSOLUTELY CAN'T write decent software.
> The impossibility of writing a decent editor is one reason we no
> longer use CDC computers here. Why can't "normal" users on NOS do
> what I would call "normal" io? If I were looking for a computer today,
> I would not even CONSIDER one that can't do that. If a manufacturer
> wants to make a computer that has severe IO problems like that, he
> should have a multiprocessor system where directly connected users
> CAN do it, offloading only the more compute bound parts of a task
> on the more remote sections of hardware.
> 
> If your OS can't do single character IO ---- FIX IT!


Er, um, ah...what makes you assume that all C programs run
on machines which have any idea of a 'keyboard', or have
anything like an 'operating system'?

I'm typing this on a 5620 terminal, which certainly
has a C compiler, but has an `operating system' which would
hardly be adequate for any kind of stand-alone computer.

Let's not forget about phone switching equipment,
the computers on which a large fraction of the C
code ever written is running.

The stdio libraries guarentee that you can pump data
back and forth between the 'stdin', 'stdout', 'stderr',
and 'files', but who said any of these were keyboards,
screens, or disks?  The PostScript language has all
the same ideas, but most printers implement 'std(in|out|err)'
as the serial port, and 'files' as blocks of memory.
The same language running as part of NeWS (a
PostScript based windowing system), 'std(in|out)' to
the socked which connected to the window server,
'stderr' to the stderr of the server, and files
do disk files.

> If your OS can't do single character IO ---- FIX IT!

I totally agree here, but what does it have to do with 
the C language?!?
-- 
Name:			Christopher J. Calabrese
Brained loaned to:	AT&T Bell Laboratories, Murray Hill, NJ
att!ulysses!cjc		cjc@ulysses.att.com
Quote:	``I'm sure Henry Spencer will have a .signature on this soon.''