Portability

[Gisle Hannemyr]

bryan at quame.UUCP (Bryan A. Woodruff) wrote:
> Do not all systems have a tree directory or some other directory structure?

No, they do no.

Embedded systems do not even have a file system, and some
operating systems (e.g. CMS, SINTRAN-III) have a sufficiently weird file
system to make directory operations targeted towards the UNIX, MS-DOS,
OS/2, VMS directory paradigms more or less useless.

There is a standard that do what you want.  IEEE POSIX 1003.1 is an
_operating system_ interface standard, and defines how C should interface
to the operating system, including the interface to the directory.

To put the specification of that interface in the _language_ standard
would severely limit the scope of the language.

- gisle hannemyr  (Norwegian Computing Center)
  EAN:   gisle at nr.uninett
  Inet:  gisle at ifi.uio.no
  UUCP:  ...!mcvax!ifi!gisle
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