fgetpos, fsetpos, and ANSIness in general

[Andrew P. Mullhaupt]

In article <OTTO.89Oct8093607 at tukki.jyu.fi>, otto at tukki.jyu.fi (Otto J. Makela) writes:
> Here I go again, braving all the flames of the whole network...
> 
> In general, I've come to the same conclusion as a friend: "Seems the ANSI thing
> has several changes just to make life difficult for traditional Unix C users."
> Many of the "features" are truly bizarre (think about #) and there is a real
> danger of creeping Pascalism (now that was a nasty thing to say -- should I
> crosspost to alt.religion.computers ? :-)
> 
Well some of think that creeping Pascalism would improve the C language
but raging militant jihad Pascalism is what is really called for.

Seriously, folks, One of the resident C experts (and here we have several
actual C experts) once explained to me how to structure all my inlude
files and always use function prototypes for sources with many files.
I was stunned to find how primitive C was compared even to the unit
facility of early Pascals and the sleek modernity of Modula-2. Why
can't I have an array of function variables? Why do I need to creat
a spurious structure name on the way to a recursive typedef? 

>From what I can see the ANSI style of C is ten times more reasonable
than what went before. (ANSI standards are two for three with me,
since they are improving FORTRAN with 8x, but they could have had
variable length arrays (ISO level 1) in Pascal and chickened out
instead.)

Later,
Andrew Mullhaupt

P.S. Thanks to all who suggested ways to get macro expansion and
indentation into incomprehensible code. It was all for naught in
my case, since the macro expansion (even after removing trivial
and "include source" lines) resulted in an increase from 65 to
720 lines of source in one typical case. The indent and cb programs
were broken by trying this code, (indent introduced a syntax error
due to somehow substituting *= where =* was required). This could
only happen in C.

Disclaimer: These opinions are all mine, but I constantly try to
export them.