bcopy

Guy Harris guy at auspex.UUCP
Sat Dec 10 17:09:42 AEST 1988


>[Sorry it this isn't the "perfect" group for this, but y'all were
> talking about index vs strchr so this can't be too far off.]

[Except "bcopy" isn't part of any ANSI C draft, so it's definitely not a
"C Standard" issue, it's more of a UNIX issue.  (The ANSI C drafts specify
"memcpy", and the S5 man page explicitly says that it's
implementation-dependent - "overlapping moves may yield surprises".)]

>What does the following mean?  [What should it do?]

It *appears* that the 4.3BSD implementation is intended not to yield
surprises.  The 4.3-tahoe documentation doesn't appear to make any such
claim (although the C-language version also appears to be intended not
to yield surprises).

Keith?  Chris?  If being unsurprising is intended to be a defined
characteristic of the interface, the man page should really state that,
so that implementors don't screw up.



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