Het Byron,

 > While I understand the INT returned is usable for
 > ERRORLEVEL testing in
 > DOS batch files, are there other reasons also that
 > easily come to mind?

    Many operating systems other than DOS provide environments - unix for example.

 > It seems that many MS supplied DOS commands failed to
 > follow the
 > standard. Is that one reason "standard" is often
 > stressed to others?

    No. MS supplied extensions to the language usually perform useful
functions that were available in POSIX and were either redundant or
implementation dependent and so did not need to be incorporated. MS uses
the underscore initial character to distinguish these functions from
standard functions.

 > Perhaps you could explain why I see "the standards"
 > and "portability"
 > stressed by many, almost with a religious fervor. Of
 > course I
 > understand, in general, that without standards we
 > might have chaos.

    It depends how old you are Byron. When BASIC was first introduced it
was a single code, and was simple enough for everybody to use. Then
Hewlett-Packard 'developed' it one way and Microsoft another way, so that
we ended up with three different languages - Dartmouth BASIC, HP BASIC and
MS BASIC. We just want to avoid going down that path with C.

 > Am seeking info, reasons, and opinion with *no* desire
 > to quibble.

    So I hope the information helps.

Best wishes,
Bill.

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