POSIX bashing

[Bob Bagwill]

I was...

<flame suit on>

the author of the first version of the termios section of the
NIST POSIX Conformance Test Suite and of the first version of the
test assertions for that chapter, but I wasn't a member of the POSIX.1
or .3 work groups.

<weeping violin playing softly in the background>

Writing test assertions and tests for POSIX or UNIX based merely
on POSIX.1 or SVID is no fun.  I cheated and read source code to try
to understand what was going on.

You remember the story about the four blind men and the elephant.
Given the descriptions from the blind men, how would you write
a field guide to identifying elephants?  And given the field guide,
could you build an elephant from scratch? (Sorry for the
characterization of the POSIX work groups as blind men :-)

Firing up another metaphor here...

IMHODI (In my humble opinion and deep ignorance) UNIX is like the
Bible (I'll leave it to someone more knowlegable to write a humorous
version of the history of UNIX recast in biblical terms).

It was written by many people in many languages over many years.
Each author claimed to be divinely inspired. :-)  Each publisher of
subsequent revisions had to guess what the original authors REALLY meant.
Each contributing editor felt free to rewrite, restate, translate,
discard, etc. any pieces that didn't fit, and add their own extensions,
explanations, etc.

POSIX is just the most recent edition.  It's no surprise that it's not
backward compatible.  It's no surprise that everyone wants to add
stuff.