C for the compleat novice?

[arritt at kuhub.cc.ukans.edu]

I've been trying to take advantage of the large amount of software that
is available in public domain.  Binaries for the 4D seem to work ok, 
but I can *never, ever* get C source code to compile.  This even includes 
code obtained from SGI via this newsgroup.

What I'm wondering is -- do you need to "set up" your system to compile C
code?  I don't know anything at all about C; I program in [asbestos suit on]
Fortran [asbestos suit off] and besides am more of an end-user than a 
programmer anyway.  Should you not really expect C source code to work
without some tweaking?   Is C inherently non-portable?

Recent example:  I tried to get a .gif viewer to compile and obtained
the following error output.

 
	cc -O -c xgif.c
cpp: error /usr/include/X11/Xos.h:69: Can't find include file strings.h
cpp: error /usr/include/bsd/sys/ioctl.h:9: Can't find include file net/soioctl.h
cpp: error /usr/include/bsd/sys/ioctl.h:10: Can't find include file sys/ttychars.h
*** Error code 1

Stop.


Now, I guessed it was trying to find the files ending in .h, but thought they
weren't on the system.  I did a "find" for each file and obtained the
following results:

/usr/include/bsd/net/soioctl.h
/usr/include/bsd/strings.h
/usr/include/bsd/sys/ttychars.h

So each of these files is on my system, but apparently the C compiler is
getting confused?

Is there any simple way around these problems?  Should I just give up, 
unless I can somehow find the time to learn a new computer language?  :-(
Whatever help you can give would be most appreciated.

P.S. my system is a 4D/25G running IRIX 3.2
________________________________________________________________________
Ray Arritt                        | 
Dept. of Physics and Astronomy    |
Univ. of Kansas                   |
Lawrence, KS  66045               |
arritt at kuhub.cc.ukans.edu         |
arritt at ukanvax.bitnet             |