ansi c and directories

[Chris Torek]

Directory operations would be useful.  But so would other things:
`Aye, there's the rub.'  Where should they stop?  An operation to
check the status of another process would be useful.  MS-DOS (which
has no processes) would always say `no such process'.  Coroutines
(another recurring, ah, thread, in comp.lang.c) would be useful too.
So would standard routines for manipulating the robot arm.  (If you
have no robot arm, these simply return an error.)  We should not
slight the temperature-and-humidity environment control routines,
either.  And then there are the radar missile-detector routines,
and . . . .

Some would say that the C standard should not even describe *any*
`file' operations; fortunately, it allows such implementations, as
what amounts to a subset of the standard (though it is not called
that).  In any case, directory operations were clearly beyond the
scope of the standard at the time it was begun---opendir &c. were
nowhere near universal in 1985.
-- 
In-Real-Life: Chris Torek, Univ of MD Comp Sci Dept (+1 301 454 7163)
Domain:	chris at cs.umd.edu	Path:	uunet!mimsy!chris