🚀 go-pugleaf

Dick Dunn writes:
< While it is true that there are holes in both J&W and K&R, the holes are
< nowhere near as numerous or as big as people like to make them out to be.
< ...

I agree that they are no bigger, but they are MUCH more numerous!

As one of the half-dozen or so people in the world who has designed and
implemented a C run-time system for a totally un-UNIX operating system
(IBM MVS), I know something about this area.  I tried looking at K&R to
find a description of what the UNIX libraries do, in order to resolve
some of the ambiguities in the ANSI standard.  Yeah, well ....

The ONLY reliable definition of the C language is the compiler, and
there is NO reliable definition of the library.  The available UNIX
implementations are subtly different, and the non-UNIX ones are often
very different.  I ended up deciding that it didn't matter too much
what I did in the problem areas, because the UNIX libraries were either
inconsistent or just plain buggy.

You may say that the library is not the language, but practical programmers
might disagree.  In any case, I have found such discrepancies in the
language proper, as well.  [I am also very much into writing portable code,
where portable means to any system/compiler you care to name.]

Come back the Algol 68 Report, all is forgiven!  I speak as an implementor.

Nick Maclaren
University of Cambridge Computer Laboratory
nmm@cl.cam.ac.uk

Someone else's quote:  "From an MVS viewpoint, it is difficult to
distinguish UNIX and MS-DOS".