Proposal for a standard C/Operating System Interface Library

[Skip Egdorf]

In article <68769 at sun.uucp>, rburns%master at Sun.COM (Randy Burns) writes:
> ... [stuff removed ...]
> 
> Have you ever wished calls to the system 
> command were portable accross operating systems? 
> 
> ... [grep sed find ] etc.
> 
> The above commands are ones that might be made into library calls
> fairly portable accross a *wide* range of existing operating systems. 
> Free or public domain versions of most of the utilities either exist 
> or will quite soon. I imagine that creating the library would take some
> degree of work. The next trick would be to get the libraries commonly 
> included with C, C++ compilers and interpreters.
> 
> ...
>
> A c++ interpreter using a standard operating system interface library 
> might even become signifantly more powerful and preferable to using
> a shell like sh or csh.
> 
> I am considering starting by writing a more detailed article on this. I would 
> appreciate feedback from folks on this proposal.  Has anyone else suggested 
> this before me? If so who and what have they written? Thanks for your help.
> 
> Randy Burns.

Well, not in C. But it HAS been done very successfully 10 years (my God,
has it really been 10 years?) ago.

For a start, look at:

[1] Software Tools; Kernighan and Plauger; Addison-Wesley 1976

[2] A Virtual Operating System; Hall, Scherrer and Sventek;
    CACM V23 N9, Sept 1980

[3] Several early 1980 Unix User's Group / Usenix procedings that include
    the Software Tools User's group papers.

In the late 1970s, several groups took the software tools code, available
from A-W and put it on a wide number of systems from CP-M to MVS, VM, and
CTSS on the Cray (and most in between). This was because the Software
Tools provided most of a Unix V6 environment on anything that had a
FORTRAN compiler. A users group came together at the Toronto Unix User's
group meeting in 1978 (or was it 79? My memory must be going) that
produced a large amount of coordination and several more and more enhanced
tapes. The purpose of this was very similar to what you discuss. We all
worked on systems that were not as friendly as Unix, and the tools were
very portable. There was not really any planning such as you propose.
We all just responded to similar needs.

I recall one Unix User's group meeting some time ago where one of the
sessions was hot and heavy into Unix portability issues. (this was
back when there were still few ports.) Mike O'dell stood up and
politely chastised those discussing this for not learrning from the
experience of the Software Tools folks who had faced and beaten most
of the problems being discussed. I might suggest that you look in the
same place for a start.

					Skip Egdorf
					hwe at lanl.gov