Path: utzoo!attcan!lsuc!ncrcan!ziebmef!mdfreed
From: mdfreed@ziebmef.uucp (Mark Freedman)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.c
Subject: Re: portability
Message-ID: <1989Jan20.055826.26116@ziebmef.uucp>
Date: 20 Jan 89 10:58:25 GMT
References: <1354@tank.uchicago.edu> <3377@arcturus> <YXnd7fy00UkaI3Om9C@andrew.cmu.edu> <908@ubu.warwick.UUCP> <9414@smoke.BRL.MIL>
Reply-To: mdfreed@ziebmef.UUCP (Mark Freedman)
Organization: Ziebmef Public Access Unix, Toronto, Ontario
Lines: 32

In article <9414@smoke.BRL.MIL> gwyn@brl.arpa (Doug Gwyn (VLD/VMB) <gwyn>) writes:
>In article <908@ubu.warwick.UUCP> geoff@emerald.UUCP (Geoff Rimmer) writes:
>>Awww come on!  The main extensions they have provided are not
>>essential to programming in C - a lot of the extensions are things
>>like new keywords like
>>	pascal, fortran, cdecl, far, near, huge.
>
>Some of us would argue that the ABSENCE of these extensions is more
>useful to the portable-C programmer than their presence!  I have had
>code in the past that used several of these as variable names, etc.
>Unless the compiler manages to allow them as user identifiers outside
>the context of type declarations, they are bound to get in the way.
>(I don't know whether or not MicroSoft's compiler is that clever.)
>
>>BTW, can anyone tell me if the keyword 'volatile' is part of the ANSI
>>standard?  (I mean is it true to say that all ANSI C compilers must
>>have the keyword volatile WORKING (i.e. semantically as well as
>>syntactically)?)
>
>Certainly.  What would be the point if it didn't have to work?


   The Turbo C 2.0 reference manual alleges that the -A option causes the
compiler to ignore non-ANSI extensions, and that Turbo C keywords such as
far, near, pascal, etc. may then be used as identifiers.
   It's possible that Microsoft C has a similar option.

btw    I see that fstat() is not part of the ANSI stdio lib (unless I've missed
something). How does one determine the length of a file in a portable fashion ?
bbtw   As I recall, Microsoft implements the volatile keyword syntactically but
not semantically. Perhaps their motto could be "we're BIG, so we don't HAVE to
be good" :-)