retiring gets(3)

[David Collier-Brown]

> In article <1988Nov8.054845.23998 at utstat.uucp> geoff at utstat.uucp (Geoff Collyer) writes:
>>If your vendor protests your reasonable request, point out that gets,
>>as part of stdio, is a decade-old backward compatibility hack for
>>compatibility with the Sixth Edition UNIX Portable I/O Library, which
>>was utterly replaced by stdio no later than 1979.  

>From article <22402 at watmath.waterloo.edu>, by atbowler at watmath.waterloo.edu (Alan T. Bowler [SDG]):
> While the vendor may sympathize with the reasoning, the mechanics
> of the the US Federal bureaucracy work against this.  As long as
> gets() is in the an official ANSI standard, it will be in a the validation
> suites.

  (Hi, Allan!)
  This raises the interesting, and possibly invidious, question of
why the ANSI C standard includes gets...  It may prove advisable to
ask for its elimination on the next (NOT! current) round of
standardization, and a request from the (U.S) DOD Computer Security
Center (sic) for an exception in the validation suite...

--dave
-- 
 David Collier-Brown.  | yunexus!lethe!dave
 Interleaf Canada Inc. |
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