ANSI, K&R, H&S (was: Re: Just a minor new twist on free())

[Doug Gwyn]

In article <PDS.90Nov2141442 at lemming.webo.dg.com> pds at lemming.webo.dg.com (Paul D. Smith) writes:
>what good is it to make your C code portable when you have much larger
>portability issues ... which will cause your code to not work on any
>other system without major re-working?

Only a fraction of your application would be system-specific; if good
code modularization is practiced, probably the majority of your code
would be usable in other applications and in other environments.  It
is that generally-useful code that should be made portable.

In the huge software project ("MUVES") that I have been involved in for
the past four years, the application itself (even though designed with
a large measure of generality) is of little interest in non-military
environments; however, it needed a large amount of support code that is
quite useful for other applications.  Indeed, there were several
unrelated applications that utilized the MUVES support packages before
the MUVES application itself was working.  I've maintained a general C
programming support library for local use, to which I intend to add all
the generally useful MUVES support packages.  Such libraries have been
extremely valuable at other places that I have worked, and I expect
them to be of value almost anywhere that they are tried (assuming that
proper care is used in designing the functionality and interfaces).

>Portability is very important to me; I'm going to make all my code
>rigorously portable under the ANSI standard for the C programming
>language.

Portability is also very important to me.  However, at present there
are too many systems that I have to port applications to that do not
provide an implementation of standard C.  In fact our Crays are just
about the only ones that do.  Therefore, I've chosen a subset of the
UNIX System V Release 2 C library as the "portable interface", and
for the C language proper and the preprocessor, provide both Reiser/
PCC compatible and standard conforming code, using a configuration
parameter to determine what code is compiled.  (I have a configuration
header "std.h" that sets this parameter and provides other system-
dependent definitions.)