Re: [9fans] the declaration of main()

["William K. Josephson" <wkj@eecs.harvard.edu>]

On Fri, Apr 27, 2001 at 04:22:31PM +0000, Douglas A. Gwyn wrote:
> Boyd Roberts wrote:
> > i don't agree because:
> >     general purpose solutions aren't
>
> Standards would be, except for bull-headedness on the part
> of a small minority.  We even got the Gnu folks to appreciate
> the value of providing standard conformance, while continuing
> to innovate in other ways.

I believe you mean "innovate".  ;-)

> All that fighting a well-established standard does is to
> isolate you from the rest of the world.  Do you really think
> that there is no C code of value except for whatever has been
> constructed specifically for Plan 9?

Of course not, but GNU, for instance, has very different objectives.
It is one thing to claim that there is valuable C source out there
other than what comes with Plan 9 and a very different thing to claim
that Plan 9 should support it.  In fact, in my experience, the Plan 9
source code is far *more* portable to other environments than most
Unix source is between Unix variants, for instance. I don't understand
your unwillingness to accept that Plan 9 as a research system need not
support legacy code beyond what the APE provides.  I am aware of at
least one other research system that did try to be standards compliant
and the result was that those working on the project spent far more
effort on engineering than research.  People can legitimately have
different priorities.

  -WJ