[Gllug] open source centric ICT in Schools from Sept 2012 ?

[Alain Williams]

On Wed, Jan 18, 2012 at 01:17:55AM +0000, Nix wrote:

> You claimed that the Unix file system was an API. It isn't: it's a
> family of file storage data structures. POSIX does not define the Unix
> file system: it only defines a C interface for file storage
>
> (Maybe I am being excessively pedantic here. OK, OK, I *know* I'm being
> excessively pedantic here.)

Yes. But I was a bit loose in my language, but we are essentially saying the
same thing.

> > No. About 20-25 years ago I spent a lot of time porting programs between various
> > different versions of Unix. Yes: there were a few places that needed #ifdef
> > some feature or another, but that was a very small %age of the code.
> 
> Actually various parts of Unix became a porting nightmare before POSIX
> came along. Signal handling and terminal I/O were a particular rat's
> nest (and were hardly elegant before that), but there were lots of other
> nasty gratuitously 'differentiated' areas, including e.g. socket
> handling. In fact it's easier to list the areas that were *not*
> pointlessly divergent before POSIX than to list the areas that were.

But these things were easily handled in a few functions within the application
that contained all the nastyness inside them. The rest of the code was/is
reasonably clean. The 'nasty' functions were a relatively small part of the
codebase of most applications.

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Alain Williams
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