Thoughts on moving towards ANSI

[Larry W. Virden]

I have been talking to a software publisher who is working on a new C compiler.
His statement was that he was going to provide as much ANSI as possible, but
that there were some points at which there would be problems, since the existing
environment of C code for this machine (GS/Mac type environment) used a few
special extensions that were incompatible with ANSI.  As an example, he mentioned
that in APW C and I assume MPW C, a printf format of %p was used for 'pascal'
format strings, where the length is specified as a 2 byte (?) value before
the string.  Thus, he wasnt going to be able to support the ANSI %p for pointer
format.

How will other vendors be handling the changing of such things - note that
this isnt a compile time problem but a run time problem.  Will all other
vendors in non-unix environments just force customers to go with the new
standard, become semi-standard, or is there some standard ways someone can
specify whether certain run time interpretations are to be made...


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Larry W. Virden	 674 Falls Place, Reynoldsburg, OH 43068 (614) 864-8817
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