casts to (void)

[Peter da Silva]

> I SAID that if you stick to a lowest common denominator, you would not
> be able to use these nifty functions.

And I said our native library (not the cross-compiler library) doesn't have
them. I.E... WE DON'T HAVE THESE ROUTINES! We are forced to stick to the lowest
common denominator because that's all we have. It's more economical to write
the specific parts of them that we may want in our system then to write
the whole shebang. Lots of people are in this situation... ever hear of V7?

> These comments were specifically directed at the problems of developing
> code for a UNIX-like target system (I had 4.2BSD in mind) if a standard
> environment is not available.

Well, you could have made that clearer. I thought we were talking about
the 'C' language here, not UNIX. Or has this suddenly turned into
"net.unix.c"?

> You could even provide substantially the same environment on your MS-DOS
> system.  The Software Tools Users Group has shown the way.  I did this
> once for a RSTS/E system, which is not inherently very much like UNIX,

At least it supports multitasking. How do you implement popen on that poor
excuse for a file server known as MS-DOS?

> Are you aware of the current efforts to generate (international)
> standards for a portable operating system interface?  This should make

That sounds like an awfully low common denominator to me... some operating
systems have an awfully limited set of operations.

> the application developer's work much easier in the long run.

And I have implemented much of Software Tools on RSX, so I know whereof 
I speak.
-- 
	Peter da Silva (the mad Australian werewolf)
		UUCP: ...!shell!neuro1!{hyd-ptd,baylor,datafac}!peter
		MCI: PDASILVA; CIS: 70216,1076