Using sdtlib.h on a Sun system

[david d [zoo] zuhn]

>>>>> On 1 Oct 90 21:58:18 GMT, Kartik Subbarao said:

Kartik> In article <1990Sep30.152249.15810 at fmrco> Richard J. Niziak writes:
>I am fairly new to 'C' and am trying to complie a simple intro 
>program on my Sun 4/370. I use two include headers, stdio.h and stdlib.h
>And when the complie goes through, it cannot find stdlib.h.
>I have the entries in the program like this:
>#include <stdio.h>
>#include <stdlib.h>
>Very confused....
>Please help.

Kartik> stdlib.h is an ANSI Cism. You can only use ANSI C if you have
Kartik> an ANSI C compiler (such as gcc). Once you are sure that your
Kartik> compiler indeed is an ANSI C compiler, you might want to take
Kartik> a look at /usr/include (or whatever is defined as the default
Kartik> include directory on your system) and see whether stdlib.h
Kartik> exists. If not, then you probably have to look at the compiler
Kartik> and see if it put the .h files anywhere else. If you are still
Kartik> confused, your best bet then is to contact your sysadmin about
Kartik> it...

Actually, the more correct statement is that you can write ANSI style
code if your compiler supports it (like gcc does), but you cannot
write ANSI C code unless your library conforms to the standard.  
SunOS prior to 4.1 had very little that was done to be compatible with
draft versions of the standard.  Now that it is truly a standard, they
have some ANSI'isms available (stdlib.h exists on my SS1 running 4.1).

Sun still does not have a compiler that will support ANSI style code
however, so they haven't done everything needed to support an ANSI C
library (e.g. malloc still returns char*).  I have heard that the next
release of their product C compiler will support some ANSI features
(such as function prototypes), but the current suite of compilers
don't.  This is why I use gcc on all the Unix boxes that I use. 

The GNU project is currently working on a C library that conforms to
the ANSI standard, POSIX interfaces, as well as maintaining BSD and
SysV compatibility.  No, don't ask when this will be released, it's
not ready yet.

Until either FSF or Sun released an ANSI C library, you're hosed.  You
can sort of do okay by SunOS 4.1, but not fully.


david d [zoo] zuhn		Univ. of Minnesota Dept. of Astronomy
zoo at aps1.spa.umn.edu		      Automated Plate Scanner Project