fast code and no morals

[Doug Gwyn]

In article <720 at ttrdc.UUCP> levy at ttrdc.UUCP (Daniel R. Levy) writes:
>What about a system where it is impossible to give command line arguments to a
>program, like the early-stone-age card reading IBM systems?   Not all C runs
>on Unix ya know....  (Is C only allowed to run on machines that DO allow
>command line arguments?  What does the proposed ANSI C standard say about this?)
>Would this program just get run with an argc of 0 in the case of a stone
>age system?  As a matter of fact, must a system support both upper and lower
>case characters to support C?  (Would Cyber-type machines with 6 bit character
>codes be out of the running?)  Perhaps nobody these days would WANT such a sys-
>tem, rendering the point moot, but for the sake of argument :-), what if someone
>had such a system and wanted to keep on using it, but with C rather than say,
>Fortran (which would have no trouble with the absence of command line arguments
>and the single case of characters)?

In a hosted (as opposed to stand-alone) environment, yes, C requires
that programs be able to obtain arguments specified at the time they
are run.  The Software Tools people have accomplished this on
virtually every major mainframe and minicomputer OS, so it is doable.

Yes, C requires support of both upper- and lower-case characters.
Modern Cybers claim to have support for 8- or 12-bit characters.

Nobody promised that C could be implemented on an abacus.