26 Feb
2012
26 Feb
'12
1:24 a.m.
On Sat, 25 Feb 2012, Random832 wrote:
On 2/22/2012 11:30 PM, Greg 'groggy' Lehey
wrote:
Though DOS's file i/o calls, starting in 2.0, were much the same as
Unix's already. Its open, close, read, write have the same basic
semantics and at one point it was possible to have DOS require a syntax
like \dev\con for devices.
-uso.
On Thursday, 23 February 2012 at 8:22:17 +1100,
Dave Horsfall wrote:
Yes and no. IIRC, gcc doesn't do that on, for example, Linux ELF. it's
done
on windows, I assume, in deference to the windows 32-bit ABI for cdecl
calling convention functions.
Now, as far as where windows gets that from (just because something evolved
within one company doesn't mean it didn't evolve), supposedly early versions
of Microsoft C (pre-ANSI) were very conservative in terms of adhering to the
"standard" set by Unix C and K&R - this could have extended to the
prepending
of underscores. For instance, this is, according to Raymond Chen, why they
added WinMain rather than extending main (they didn't know if extensions to
main would be allowed). I would also guess it's why MSVC stdio is implemented
on top of an imitation of Unix system calls which is in turn implemented on
top of DOS/windows; and why MSVC time_t is defined as seconds since 1970.
There are comments in the code referring to XENIX in various places relating
to I/O and timestamps, so it's possible that MSVC's C library was indeed, to
some small degree, based on Unix. On Wed, 22 Feb 2012, arnold(a)skeeve.com wrote:
I'm no friend
of Microsoft either, but gcc isn't exactly Microsoft.
What Arnold mentions here is Unix history in action.
It also shows the consequences a small,
apparently local decision
can have: here we are 40+ years later and GCC on Windows is still
preprending underscores to function names!
When it comes to Windoze, nothing
surprises me any more. Unix has
evolved over the years, but Windoze was spat out and hatched.