24 Jan
2013
24 Jan
'13
8:52 p.m.
On Jan 24, 2013, at 7:42 AM, Ronald Natalie wrote:
On Jan 24, 2013, at 1:02 AM, Larry McVo
Historically the only implementation I know that didn't just multiply the two args
together was on VAX/VMS's VAXC. The underlying filesystem had a notion of a file of
records, so you'd get very different result from n * size, 1 and n, size. The former
would produce one record that was n * size, while the latter would produce n records, each
of which was size in length. As with all things on that compiler, this was only sometimes,
and it greatly depended on how the file was created... Mostly a royal pain, except in some
very rare instances where it was what you wanted to happen.
Warner
As a SPARC guy (in the past), I think it may have
had something to do
about alignment.
That said, I hate the fread/fwrite interfaces. We're fixing them in
our stdio. freadn(f, buf, n).
Amen. For practical matters, there is no way given the rest of the library
that an implementation can do
anything other than multiply the two middle args together. The stream still needs to
be a byte stream
and passing things as void* sort of divorces any clue as to what alignment or other
portability requirements
are (and I've worked on C on some rather odd word sized machines like 36 and 60 as
well as machines
that encode the word size in the pointer... believe me there were TONS of bugs in 4BSD
with regard to that
one where they would stuff a char* into a union and retrieve it with a int* thwarting any
possible conversion
(as we put in place when you casted one pointer to other). It's not true that FILE went at the end, except
in vararg'd functions. It goes at the beginning of ftell (which
mimics the UNIX tell call). As with Larry, I'd much perferred they mimic'd
most of the UNIX calls when
possible. They were reasonably thought out.
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