Free-standing vs. hosted implementations

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2 total messages Started by J M Hicks Fri, 05 Aug 1988 09:43

#5261

Author: J M Hicks
Date: Fri, 05 Aug 1988 09:43

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Some items in this news group or comp.lang.c have
alluded to a distinction made in the draft
ANSI standard for C between "free-standing" and "hosted" implementations of C.

What does this mean?  Anyone who does is invited to send me mail or submit
another item of news --- whichever you think is better.
--
J. M. Hicks (a.k.a. Hilary),
Computing Services, Warwick University, Coventry, England. CV4 7AL
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Re: Free-standing vs. hosted implementations

#5262

Author: Henry Spencer
Date: Sun, 07 Aug 1988 00:57

18 lines
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In article <672@sol.warwick.ac.uk> cudat@warwick.ac.uk (J M Hicks) writes:
>Some items in this news group or comp.lang.c have
>alluded to a distinction made in the draft
>ANSI standard for C between "free-standing" and "hosted" implementations of C.
>
>What does this mean? ...

"Hosted" means the sort of environment that people are used to in Unix, with
a library, a file system, etc etc.  "Free-standing" means the sort of thing
which arises when you are writing code to be put into ROM in, say, a micro-
controlled toaster:  no libraries except what you bring with you, no files,
non-standard program startup methods, etc.  The distinction comes up because
X3J11 wants to mandate the availability of things like stdio in hosted
implementations without making it impossible to use ANSI C for programming
a toaster.
-- 
MSDOS is not dead, it just     |     Henry Spencer at U of Toronto Zoology
smells that way.               | uunet!attcan!utzoo!henry henry@zoo.toronto.edu

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