9 Jul
2018
9 Jul
'18
11:13 p.m.
With V5/V6 C I/O was a lot like what Larry was describing for getopts(3) it
was all over over the map. There was the portable I/O library which I sort
of think of as the prequel to studio but I don’t remember uSing it much. I
must have run into most of the different ways people did I/O in some
program(s) but I don’t remember any one off hand.
I think the thing to remember is that at the time system programming
languages such as C and Bliss were noted for not having I/O built into the
language- it was supported externally. DEC (CMU) with Bliss had rich set
of libraries (often in assembler already available) and force/matched by
them with their users. Unix and C grew up independently which I think is
part of why it was a tad more random. BY the time dmr adds stdio, it was
still early enough in the life to displace the randomness for something as
important as I/O, whereas lack of use of something.like getopt would not
become clearly deficient until after widespread success.
On Mon, Jul 9, 2018 at 12:37 PM Random832 <random832(a)fastmail.com> wrote:
On Sun, Jul 1, 2018, at 07:34, ron(a)ronnatalie.com
wrote:
--
Sent from a handheld expect more typos than usual
The bigger issue with the early printf is it just
called putchar and
putchar only output to stdout or what ever the global fout variable was
set to.
There was a comment in the manual that the fout concept was kludgy.
V6 'iolib' printf has an interesting approach to fixing this:
If the first argument was 0 through 9, it was taken to be a file
descriptor, and the second argument was the format string. If it was -1,
the second argument was the output string (as for later sprintf), and the
third was the format string. Otherwise, the first argument was the format
string.
(I'm curious as to how much "iolib" was actually used, since it
doesn't
appear to have been included by default - there was a different printf
routine in libc)