libraries

[entropy@gnu.ai.mit.edu]

Julain wrote:
>entroy wrote in his mail concerning library PL26:
>>Patchlevel 26 is likely to be the last patchlevel with TOS style (CR-LF
>>pair) carriage control.  Unless I hear some really good arguments against
>>doing so, I'm going to convert everything to UNIX style (LF) carriage
>>control.  Many of the programs I use get really confused with TOS style
>>files.  Also, J. Bammi's GCC libs use the UNIX style, so converting
>>everything will make sychronizing the two libraries easier.
>
>Here we go. Most of my text editors use CR/LF. Probably all GEM programs.
>Libraries that can't read or write these files are useless for me. By
>now, there's no ANSI method to do binary I/O on stdin or stdout, that's
>why I propose to implement setmode() (see 1.). And for all properly
>written programs, this is enough.

Ooops, maybe I didn't make it clear what I meant: The code in the
library will stay exactly as it is.  The source files will all have
the newlines stripped out to make my life easier.  I'll probably end
up distributing along with the library a stupid little utility I
churned out over the weekend that can strip or add CR's to a file, so
that people can convert the library source to whichever format they
like best.

>Unfortunately, some system functions have conflicting prototypes, and
>most of the OS structures are defined differently. In addition, practically
>*all* BIOS/XBIOS/GEMDOS structures are defined differently. And finally,
>even the *names* of the include files are different.
>
>Obviously, there's no way to change that without breaking existing
>source code. My proposal: let's make a new standard (together with
>Eric Smith, Pure Software and the Lattice guys). What we need:

It would probably be much easier to hack up an awk script to convert
your files, or make up a header file "compat.h" with things like
"#define DTA _DTA" and so on.  What we don't need is a new standard
that everyone will ignore...let's learn our lesson from XBRA and ARGV,
and get on with it...

Cheers,
entropy