Xref: utzoo comp.unix.questions:13343 comp.std.c:1163 Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!tut.cis.ohio-state.edu!ucbvax!ucsd!ncr-sd!greg From: greg@ncr-sd.SanDiego.NCR.COM (Greg Noel) Newsgroups: comp.unix.questions,comp.std.c Subject: Re: How can I find out cc or cpp symbols? Keywords: cpp, cc, macros Message-ID: <1348@ncr-sd.SanDiego.NCR.COM> Date: 7 May 89 23:23:28 GMT References: <10084@smoke.BRL.MIL> <1339@ncr-sd.SanDiego.NCR.COM> <7119@bsu-cs.bsu.edu> Reply-To: Greg.Noel@SanDiego.NCR.COM (Greg Noel) Organization: NCR Corporation, Rancho Bernardo Lines: 30 In article <1339@ncr-sd.SanDiego.NCR.COM> I write: >I've wondered why the ANSI committee didn't simply mandate that there be a >header file, say , that was implicitly #included, and that contained >all the machine-specific, system-specific, and vendor-specific names. In article <7119@bsu-cs.bsu.edu> dhesi@bsu-cs.bsu.edu (Rahul Dhesi) writes: >It is a terrible idea to make any assumptions about vendor-specific symbols. >There are two reasons for this. I completely concur -- but this wasn't my point. What I'm considering is the mechanism, not the contents. Once the mechanism is determined, we can moot the contents, but as long as the mechanism is outside the control of the system administrator, we are pretty much stuck with the ad-hoc stuff we have now. I think that if the mechanism were not wired in, there would be some pressure for standard things to be expected in , the same way there is pressure for standard things in, say, . And it would provide a home for the #define that specified POSIX conformance (or whatever). >Worse, System V machines define "unix". Er, this seems reasonable to me -- I thought it was.... >The right way to deal with predefined symbols is to put all >dependencies on them in a separate header file, and *manually edit that >file* when installing software on a new system. Your point is taken, although I prefer a Configure script or other mechanism to build the information, as there's less chance for error. -- -- Greg Noel, NCR Rancho Bernardo Greg.Noel@SanDiego.NCR.COM or greg@ncr-sd