🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <1995Sep11.221423.6651@forte.com> mikes@forte.com (Mike Schilling) writes:

> Why couldn't the standard define another function called, say 

> 	void sys_exit(OS_RET_TYPE)

> which does what exit does in terms of cleanup, and then exits with 
> OS-specific exit status.  The standard couldn't specify the actual type
> of OS_RET_TYPE, of course, or how to map OS-specific exit statuses into
> C types.  Much of the usefulness of sys_exit *would* be a quality of 
> implementation issue.

I'm sorry, but I see *no* way to portably use sys_exit.  Since
you have no idea what the type of its argument is, there's no way
to initialize or set _to_a_meaningful_value_ whatever you pass as
its argument.(*)


> Still, writing largely portable programs which 
> use OS-specific features where possible and appropriate would be far eaiser
> if this kind of thing were encouraged and where possible mandated.

This statement has left me almost speechless.  I presume that you
think that your sys_exit() function is an example of such a
feature. Can you please provide an example of *portable* usage of
your sys_exit()?  You'd like to encourage the usage of
implementation specific behaviour?  What's the point of the
standard then?

The best the standard can do is provide way for a program to
stop, and provide at least one way to use this method with a
defined meaning.  The standard actually goes beyond the minimum
in matching 'current practice' and provides *3* usages, with 2
defined meanings, and then says that if your environment can't
provide that much, it can only qualify as a freestanding
implementation.  Poof, done.  You want implementation defined
behavior, you know where to find it (eg, call a library function
not defined by the standard).



(*) I suppose you could do something like this:

int main(void)
{
   OS_RET_TYPE foo;
   char *q = "foo bar baz";
   char *p = (char *)&foo;

   memset(&foo, 0, sizeof(foo));
   while ((p - (char *)&foo) < sizeof(foo)) {
      *p++ = *q++;
   *--p = '\0';
   sys_exit(foo);
}

but while you've now initialized foo with a value of sorts, you
have no clue what this means to sys_exit().


Philip Guenther

----------------------------------------------------------------
Philip Guenther			UNIX Systems and Network Administrator
Internet: guenther@gac.edu	Phonenet: (507) 933-7596
Gustavus Adolphus College	St. Peter, MN 56082-1498
I am _not_ a representative sample of the Gustavus Community.  Yeah, right...
Source code never lies (it just misleads).  (Programming by Purloined Letter?)