Clem Cole <clemc@ccc.com> wrote:

> 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.

I think "widespread access" is more like it for getopt.  Getopt dates
to 1980; it was in System III (I just checked). That's only about two years
after V7 which was circa 1978.

Here are the dates:

-rw-rw-r-- 1 arnold arnold 1073 Apr 11  1980 usr/src/lib/libc/pdp11/gen/getopt.c
-rw-rw-r-- 1 arnold arnold 2273 May 16  1980 usr/src/man/man3/getopt.3c

But the world outside the Bell System didn't have System III. Getopt
didn't become "popular" until System V or so, and became much easier to
adopt once Henry Spencer published his public domain rewrite of the code
and man page.

Just a nit, (:-)

Arnold