Saturday October 14 1995 11:54, you wrote to me:

Paul,

 PE>  * Forwarded from area 'OS2PROG'

 PE> Can you quote a reference on this.  The only reference I know of is
 PE> that if a vendor-function pollutes the namespace when compiling in

You're right. It's this I was refering to. But won't any function not
defined by the ANSI standard fall under this clause ?

 PE> If they want to do that, that's OK, but it still doesn't make the
 PE> Borland approach wrong.

I didn't say (or at least didn't meant to say) it is wrong, only that MS or
IBMs way of doing it is easier for me.

 PE> discussion was not about who has the best posix environment, but
 PE> whether there was something wrong with Borland's ISO-compliance claim.

Ok, I jumped in late on that thread and seem to have missed the point.

 PE> You tried to turn an ISO-conforming compiler into a Posix-conforming
 PE> compiler.

If I had tried to do that I would have had much more work :) I would have
had to change the library and the header as full posix compliance involves
much more than having open, close etc., as you may know.

 PE> of days ago], BCOS2 1.5 doesn't have a fork(), which means they
 PE> are not Posix-compliant already.  I very much doubt that Borland
 PE> claim to be posix-compliant anyway.

The only compiler (or better library) that has fork is the C library of the
emx gcc port. But the documentation strongly advises not to use fork as it
doesn't fit well into OS/2s process model.

 PE> can't remember whether or not posix requires open() to be prototyped
 PE> in stdio.h,

Nope, it doesn't require it. And quite a few other common (unix) functions
don't have a place in std headers. That's why on most unix machines you'll
find the unistd.h that declares things like open(),close(),exec() etc.

 PE> #ifdef DO_PROTOTYPES

 PE> should not do

 PE> #ifdef __STDC__

 PE> if they then turn around and start writing non-ISO code

Of cause you're right. But tell that to the zillion people writing free
software mostly for the unix world :) But how do you distinguish a K&R
compiler from an ANSI compiler if not by testing for __STDC__ ? And
additionally to the above mentioned, you will want prototypes, standard
headers and in some cases the token pasting capabilities of an ANSI
compiler.

 PE> Another *possibility* is that you can go "-D__STDC__=1" on the
 PE> command line compile of Borland to get what you want.

Without changing the headers this won't help you in such a case.

 PE> him to report it back to the people in the USA in charge of it.  I'm
 PE> not sure whether they accepted that change I made or not.

Judging from my efforts I'd guess they will ignore such stuff.


                                                     Philipp


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