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From: terry@cs.weber.edu (A Wizard of Earth C)
Subject: Re: POSIX, compatibility with (was: Re: File Truncation Philosophy
Message-ID: <1993May1.071408.11761@fcom.cc.utah.edu>
Sender: news@fcom.cc.utah.edu
Organization: Weber State University (Ogden, UT)
References: <1993Apr28.113238.13749@klaava.Helsinki.FI> <1993Apr29.210327.27310@fcom.cc.utah.edu> <1rqkup$ag3@smurf.sub.org>
Date: Sat, 1 May 93 07:14:08 GMT
Lines: 39
In article <1rqkup$ag3@smurf.sub.org> urlichs@smurf.sub.org (Matthias Urlichs) writes:
>> Any extension we make, whether or not allowed, and expecially to fundamental
>> services like process creation, risks our ability to run strictly compliant
>> programs. [...]
>
>I submit that any program which crashes&burns when confronted with a
>non-POSIX error code from _any_ system call does not adhere to the
>aforementioned Section 2.4 and thus is not strictly POSIX compliant
>in the first place. ;-)
I submit that it is not possible to implement signals if one uses a 100%
strict reading of the standard. I further submit that a full implementation
of an MS-DOS file system will be Posix compliant when mounted read only but
not when mounted read-write. I also submit that UFS file system shipped
on Solaris 2.1 and UNIX SVR4.2 is not strictly Posix compliant, nor is it
possible to make it so without removing its potential to run on SMP
hardware (something more desirable than strict conformance if one owns a
SPARCStation 690).
Of course, when I first cited Posix as a standard to be adhered to, I
intended that the adherence be limited to the two best known validation
suites on the market rather than a semanticists reading.
No offense, but a careful reading of 2.4 will show you you can't write a
Posix compliant program without dynamically loadable code modules for error
handling so that extensions to the error set can be tracked in binaries.
Let's not lose the forest for the trees.
Terry Lambert
terry@icarus.weber.edu
---
Any opinions in this posting are my own and not those of my present
or previous employers.
--
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